In mid-April 2003, I stood in Fifty Acre Wood, five miles west of Bristol, watching Thom Yorke stomp, slowly, repeatedly through the undergrowth. Under the watchful eye of filmmaker Chris Hopewell, he was shooting scenes for the Jan Švankmajer-inspired, stop-motion video for ‘There, There’, the first single from Radiohead’s upcoming sixth album.

Hail to the Thief was the follow-up to the game-changing, sound-shifting, back-to-back Kid A and Amnesiac, the lengthy, intense, making of which had nearly ripped the band apart. The new record, in contrast, had been recorded with energy, directness, speed. So much so that here was the frontman making – of all things – a pop video.

‘I’m trying to persuade the record company to shell out on lots of singles and all that stuff,’ Yorke told me when we talked in Oxford that month. Hail to the Thief, he insisted, ‘is a pop record. It’s really direct. It has this energy to it. I’d love to know that it was on the radio. Just ’cause that’s where my head's at. I don’t want to be on the top shelves at the back. ’Cause I’m into it too much. I like it. It is,’ he repeated, just for clarity, ‘pop music.’

In mid-October 2026, I stood in the rehearsal space of the National Youth Theatre in north London, watching Yorke tell a bunch of musicians – not Radiohead – that he wanted to hear again the bass being played in a new version of Hail to the Thief track ‘Where I End and You Begin’. Around him and the band, who were arranged in and under scaffolding-type boxes, a troupe of actors were working out moves under the watchful eye of choreographer Steven Hoggett and stage director Christine Jones.

This was the end of the third week of off-site rehearsals, one more to go, on Hamlet Hail to the Thief. This kinetic, musical, theatrical marriage – you might say mash-up – of Radiohead’s 2003 album and Shakespeare’s play premiered in 2025, with brief runs in Manchester’s Aviva Studios and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now, it was preparing to open at the Barbican in London for a three-month run.

I watched the company, led by returning actor Samuel Blenkin (Alien: Earth) as Hamlet, work on scene 12. Titled State of Play, the script notes describe it as a ‘physical sequence replac[ing] dialogue. The actors and the scenes it replaces [include] Hamlet witnessing Gertrude and Claudius sexually entangled, creating an emotional arc going from “the play’s the thing” and “to be or not to be.”’

The scene is scored by Yorke’s reworking of ‘Where I End and You Begin’, the sixth track on Hail to the Thief, with a male and female vocalist in the corner repeating the climactic lyrics: ‘There’ll be no more lies, I will eat you alive…’

Even in rehearsals, cast and crew and band in mufti, the effect is utterly thrilling.

This is one of the 27 scenes that the play has been edited down to for a running time of between 90 and 100 minutes, the action soundtracked by Yorke’s jigsawed versions of the album’s 14 songs. As the musician, ever the iconoclast, describes Hamlet Hail to the Thief: ‘It moves at a fast pace. It's not four hours. It doesn't have long soliloquies where you can go to sleep, wake up again, you’ve still not missed anything...’ He caught himself and smiled. ‘Um...Did I say that?’

He did indeed, and a lot more besides, when, over lunchbreak, I sat down with Yorke, Jones and Hoggett to discuss the third and biggest outing for their innovative show.

Wallpaper*: Thom, how did constructing this show last year, and now again this year, compare to making an album?

Thom Yorke: When you put a record together, you hope that one piece may move one way. But when it moves in another direction for another track, they're complementing each other. So there's an accumulated emotional effect that happens. Which is the bit that, when we set about this, I hadn't thought about.

There are all these people involved, and everything's happening all around the stage. And some nights the first thing that Hamlet does is get a laugh. And you're like: ‘What, already?’ That kind of thing. That affects how you see the music, too.

But there's also a very selfish element to it. The arc of whatever this is has to satisfy something in my musical head, too.

W*: Christine, what are the origins of this idea?

Christine Jones: I saw the Hail to the Thief tour in 2003 at Madison Square Garden. It was the first time I'd seen Radiohead live, and I was blown away. It changed my DNA structure. Not long after, I was working on a production of Hamlet as a designer. I often write the text out, and I listen to music. I was fresh off this concert, so I was listening to the record, and I literally started writing lyrics along with words from the text. That planted a seed.

Over time, that seed kept growing, and I kept thinking about it. And it was a number of years later when I had the opportunity to ask Thom if it was something that he'd consider collaborating on. And that took a bit of time.

TY: You got a predictable answer!

W*: …which, of course, was ‘no’. But you did say yes, Thom…

TY: Eventually, yeah. It took about five years to get over the presumption of putting those two things together. This is not my world. So I didn't realise, as much as anything, that there's no sense of having to pay homage. This version of Hamlet is not a definitive version of Hamlet.

Then the more you read about these things, the more you realise that nothing is a definitive version of anything. There's no definitive version of a Pinter play. So I had to jump over a few humps in my head before eventually we started properly talking about it.

CJ: In this case, the synergy and uncanny resonances between the play and the music are a particularly fertile collision. But it's us all coming together, and bringing the work that Steven and I have done together for years, bringing experiences of being at Radiohead concerts, of being at other concerts, and seeing how everything impacts each other.

Steven Hoggett: There was something about seeing [Yorke and bandmate Jonny Greenwood’s side-project] The Smile the year before last in New York. The gig was really cheeky. And we were talking for a second about [doing this show] in the round [like The Smile shows] after seeing that gig. But it was the tonality of this cheeky band, that was still as complex and as sophisticated, but were taking our ears on a journey.

It was a big shift watching that gig. We've got 27 scenes. So it's like a greatest hits as a feel and a listening event. And I guess it is akin to – sorry to make the analogy like this, Thom – a Radiohead gig to The Smile. Somebody called The Smile the cheeky younger cousin of Radiohead, and this feels like the cheeky younger cousin of the Hamlet play. It's got an errant nature to it, but it's fleet-footed and it keeps turning itself over.

W*: When you were editing the text, Christine, to get to this ‘greatest hits’ idea of Hamlet, were you trying to shape the remaining text to individual songs? Or was it more freeform than that?

CJ: The first thing I did was, I edited the script. I took a pass at what I call creating a spine-line and pulling out all the pieces that felt the most resonant. Then once I had that, as an exercise, I did say: ‘OK, what if I start at the beginning of the album and I go to the end?’

And that first time through, there was a sense of how different characters connected to different songs thematically. The court being established was [album opening track] ‘2 + 2 = 5’. The ghost being established was ‘The Gloaming’. Ophelia being connected to ‘Sail to the Moon’. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were ‘Where I End and You Begin’.

We ended up changing a lot of that… Although, as we realised the other day, we do start at the beginning of the album and end at the end of the album. We've made a lot of adjustments and flipped scenes around, flipped songs around, but there is that container.

W*: How has it been for your dancers, Steven –

SH: Oh, I love that you call them dancers. They will love you for that!

W*: – getting their heads around the tricksy rhythms of these songs?

SH: There was that big question, and I do enjoy when somebody does this – a friend of mine, when we said we were doing this, went: ‘Who needs that? Dancing to Radiohead...?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, I understand that. I don't think I want to see that either.’

W*: So to be clear…

SH: We don't dance to Radiohead. They actually do a courtly restoration piece of choreography at one point. It's mocked, it's heightened. But the rest of it, we make a real distinction in the room, which is why I made the comment about you calling them dancers. Because they don't dance, they move. The minute you say to somebody ‘dance’, people do weird shit. Whereas if they're moving and it's intrinsic and has a qualitative nature [to] what they're thinking or saying, you can make tonnes of material. So the d-word is not one we drop in the room. Because it inhibits.

W*: When we met in 2003, Thom, with the paint still wet on Hail to the Thief, you insisted it was a pop record. Do you stand by that assessment?

TY: [winces and squirms] I don't f*cking know, do I? Clearly, I've been thinking I've been making pop since we started! So I should probably give up. You laugh, but I'm serious.

W*: The other thing you said was that you'd taken ‘a long six months off’. And then someone close to you said: ‘Why don't you just do a record where you let it happen? Just go in and do it, no agenda, nothing.’ And for you, ‘that made things click’. That energy and that drive – are you seeing a parallel energy and drive here?

TY: We were all [in the band] in agreement with that [idea]. Because we'd been through this [experience]. Kid A was a very long, tortuous process. It was really fun, but we did go a bit f*cking mad. I mean, you build your own studio, and you give yourself no deadline at all... And then after about eight or nine months, [producer] Nigel [Godrich] called it and said: ‘We have to stop. We have to finish whatever the f*ck this is.’

So, yeah, [with Hail to the Thief] we were going the other way. And because we were going the other way, there was no time to go over things. Which, as soon as it came out, I was like: ‘Oh, I kind of wish we had...’ But it's one of those weird things, you lurch from one extreme to the other.

W*: But does that directness now help with this production? Because there's a propulsion to this music, these songs.

TY: I mean, yessss... In the sense that: a lot of the songs lend themselves to be reinterpreted quite easily. And put on different instruments, and slowed down, sped up. I was actually really surprised.

My first test of the whole thing was, they did a read through in New York and they sent me it. I tentatively stumbled through it with acoustic guitar or piano or very basic [instrumentation] underneath to try see what it feels like. To have that music under the words. And I realised quickly: oh, OK, there's a lot of licence here. I can take Jonny's riff on ‘2 + 2’, I can turn it into [something] and it can go anywhere it wants. As soon as it's on the synthesiser, it's almost unrecognisable.

W*: Can you tell us, Christine, about the visuals you've designed for this show?

CJ: I worked with Brett Banakis and Sadra Tehrani as part of a collective. When we first started thinking about this, we were thinking about operating theatres. And recording studios and sound stages. I love recording studio porn. I could just look at recording studios all day long.

Even in the beginning, we weren't sure if the band and the actors were in the same space. [But] we wanted them all to feel like they were definitely in the present together, making this happen. Then over time we started looking at isolation chambers, solitary confinement chambers.

Then we found this piece of research from Nasa, on a resonant acoustic chamber. It's this space where they test the effect of sound waves on objects. They'll put a rocket ship in this room and blast it with sound. That felt like the perfect metaphor for what this world does to Hamlet. He's put into this space, and it is a kind of cruel experiment where the play and the music keep betraying him. And disorienting him. And lying to him. This experiment in how much can one soul take before it completely breaks. So the space is informed by sound.

SH: We liked the idea how speakers can sometimes look really scary. They're big, with those cones. Of course they're sexy and they're black and we see them in gigs and we love them. But actually, there’s the propensity of them to become something to weaponise.

W*: What did you learn from Manchester and Stratford in terms of what worked and what didn’t?

CJ: One of the things that was interesting is that in Manchester, it was a warehouse space. The seating was all made out of bleachers, and it felt like a gig.

TY: Metallic bleachers. When people came into the show, they'd have had three pints thinking it was going to be a gig. Then realised it wasn't. Then they ran for the toilet during the soliloquy. [Which meant the seats going] bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang...

CJ: We've been in this balance between it's a gig and it's a play. When we went to the Royal Shakespeare Company, we were in a thrust theatre space. There it felt like a play. Now at the Barbican, we get to land in a sweet spot – the brutalist architecture, the shape of that [room]… We're finding that it can exist in some space in between. Hopefully the Barbican lets us be both a play and a gig instead of one or the other.

TY: It's crazy intimate in there. F*cking bonkers.

W*: Finally, Thom: did your reconstruction or reimagining of these songs inform the performance of any of the Hail to the Thief songs on the Radiohead tour last year?

TY: [splutters] Doing this? Oh, no! What, I come to the Radiohead gig and say, ‘hey, the other band, they kind of nailed this one...’? No, no. That was not happening!

Hamlet Hail to the Thief runs from 31 October 2026 to 23 January 2027 at Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, London, EC27 8DS. Ticket information here

This autumn in London, the Hermès Maison window at 166 New Bond Street unveils a spectacular new display dreamt up by architects Space Popular. Scenes across its six arched windows sweep passersby up into a cosy and surreal drawing room built of cotton-and-silk-blend quilts in warm and toasty colours, inspired by the Georgian history of the Maison’s architecture.

Discover the new Hermès Maison window design in London

Titled ‘Ciel de Lit’, the storybook tableaux are wrapped in quilted sash windows ready to lift off into quilted clouds, a roaring fireplace, and a door that opens just ajar, hinting at imaginary worlds beyond. There’s humour in the details – floating Hermès gloves draw open the curtains, a silk scarf adorns an easel and a leather belt plugs into a stitched socket – sparking contrasts between the softness of the fabric-world and the exquisite reality of fine craft.

'We like to create things that make you look twice, widen your mind and spark curiosity,' says architect Fredrik Hellberg, one half of the Space Popular duo with architect Lara Lesmes.

Interested in virtual worlds, surrealism and trompe l’oeil, they were inspired by the strange magic of ‘moments between sleeping and waking’. The duo also looked to Hermès’ 2026 guiding creative theme of the year, ‘Venture Beyond’, and the whimsy of the London Maison itself, a magical village of six buildings and 55 uniquely designed rooms that unfolds beyond the windows.

After working together for many years, Space Popular has, over the past decade, turned increasingly to textiles, resonating with how the medium resonates deeply with the body, humanises architecture and tells stories over millennia. This first foray into quilting evolved in collaboration with a group of artisans and London-based crafts specialist Andy Knight, who joined nearly 500 pieces of quilted textiles together to create the vast installation, their largest endeavour to date.

'It’s incomprehensible how many hundreds of miles of stitching there is, yet how slow and precise it is too, because of all of the ornaments and details. You'll see that the stitching doesn't miss a millimetre,' says Hellberg, reflecting on the awe of the craft.

Space Popular worked closely with the Hermès team to curate the house’s objects within the display, many of which were drawn from the Home collection. There’s the Pippa stool, originally designed in 1983 by architects Peter Coles and Rena Dumas (1937-2009), the latter whose studio, Rena Dumas Architecture Intérieure (RDAI), now under the artistic direction of Denis Montel, is behind the design of the London Maison and establishing the interior vision of Hermès stores worldwide. As well as a luxurious sofa re-edition by Jean-Michel Frank; the Les Trotteuses d’Hermès occasional table; and Pantographe arc floor lamp.

When viewed in-person, one absorbs the architectural reflections, shifting light, the shiny speed of black cabs, and the elegant bustle of New Bond Street as another illusion, softly mirrored into the scene.

This history of Hermès’ windows is a tradition and art form in its own right, which was overseen for many years, between 1978 and 2013, by Tunisian designer-decorator Leïla Menchari (1927-2020), then in charge of the Hermès windows at Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Her work is celebrated in the book ‘Leïla Menchari, the Queen of Enchantment,' published by Hermès.

'This is the kind of legacy that you’re stepping into,' says Hellberg on Space Popular’s participation in this window display, recognising in admiration previous artistic collaborators of their generation such as Wang & Söderström. For Space Popular, part of the beauty of this installation is in reaching the broad public audience of the street with its wonder: 'We are called Space Popular for a reason,' he says, 'At our core we are really interested in what people like and what people enjoy.'

'Ciel de Lit by Space Popular' is on display at Maison Hermès at 166 New Bond St, London, W1S 4RB until 30 October 2026

Turkish cooking in London has long meant the ocakbaşı grill houses of the north-east of the capital, and few chefs have done more to move them on than Sertaç Dirik. He grew up in the kitchen of Mangal II, the Dalston dining room his father opened in 1994, and after cooking with the top names in Copenhagen, he returned home six years ago to reinvent the family business with his brother Ferhat, propelling it into the National Restaurant Awards Top 50. Kid in Soho is his first solo restaurant, and his partner is David Carter, who has spent the past decade turning out great places to eat, from Smokestak and Manteca in Shoreditch to Oma and Agora in Borough Market. Carter knows how to open a hit; recruiting Dirik has given him an extra shot of cool.

Wallpaper* dines at Kid, London

The mood: Soho, set alight

The first realisation for guests is that getting in is a challenge. Walk the length of the Frith Street frontage, and you’ll see diners having the time of their lives inside, but there’s no obvious door. That’s round the side on Bateman Street – look out for the tiny goat stamped in the metal – and the first thing it reveals is Dirik manning the flames of the grill. The second is the certainty that you’ve arrived in one of the most happening rooms in London.

Carter has worked with Box 9 for more than ten years, and here the London-based design practice has joined two units of an 1897 corner building and united them through brick: 73,000 unfired K-Briqs, to be precise, made from construction waste and used to form niches, a latticed screen, a fireplace surround and a curving wall down the stairs. ‘We studied the brick patterns and coursing found across historic London façades and worked closely with the bricklayers to understand their trade,’ says Box 9 co-founder Lou Davies. ‘The fit-out was drawn brick by brick, with every joint aligned, allowing the brick to become more than a structural material and instead a contemporary expression of Turkish symbols.’

Overhead, cork joists from Amorim in Portugal soften the ceiling, while the banquettes are covered in chocolate-brown Arc of Joan textiles, dyed by hand and embroidered with kilim motifs, and the chairs are in moss-green canvas. An oversized mobile by the Turkish artist Selin Nisa Açıkel, cast in bronze from recycled copper, hangs above the stairs that lead to the most important part of the whole operation: an open bakery.

The food: Kid gloves off

Begin with bread from downstairs: the tombik pide arrives puffed and blistered from the wood oven, the Wildfarmed pide scored and charred from the grill. Snacks come by the individual piece, so order a courgette flower in crisp batter, blanketed in grated tulum goat’s cheese and drizzled with atom honey, and chubby slices of the house sucuk sausage with a purée of grilled peach that tastes like sweet ketchup. From the meze, muhammara comes heaped with walnuts and feta-like beyaz peynir, and the hummus is all but buried under a crunchy rubble of fried chickpeas.

Skewers of lamb belly and sweetbreads, glossy and blackened at the edges, are a contrast of succulence and squidge cut through by a bed of grilled onions, but the showstopper is the mixed kebap: Adana köfte, chicken and lamb piled high with scorched peppers and a tangle of pink onions, plus a çoban salata of cucumber and tomato on the side.

To finish, the mountain tea rice pudding with orange blossom is already one of London’s most tempting desserts, like a sophisticated cross between Ambrosia and crème brûlée. And whatever else you drink, have a şeftali margarita, as peachy as a Bellini. And, happily, the door is much easier to find on the way out.

Kid is located at 55 Frith Street, London W1D 4SJ, UK

The reveal of the annual Margaret Howell calendar serves not only as a reminder of the passing of another year, but an insight into the perennial British designer’s interests and inspirations; previous editions have featured archival posters from London’s Design Centre (2017), the textile works of designer Lucienne Day (2025), and the ‘British landscapes’ of photographer Edwin Smith (2015).

For 2027, the theme is altogether more personal: titled ‘Photographs by Margaret Howell’, the project will see each month feature an image taken by the designer herself on her Nikon SLR camera or smartphone, spanning various decades and capturing ‘places, objects and details’ – from beach walks in Suffolk to self-portraits in her Blackheath workroom. Without a specific theme, they instead offer a glimpse of how Howell sees the world: most notably, through moments of everyday beauty and a fixation with surface, texture and found objects.

‘It is always when you see something that’s either unusual or really beautiful,’ says Howell. ‘If you can capture that – quite often you can’t ... [If it] surprises you or excites you, you just want to take a photo.’

Coinciding with the calendar’s release, a series of images will be displayed in the designer’s Wigmore Street store in London, while a new book, titled Margaret Howell: Life and Work, offers a companion piece. Published by Japanese company Shueisha, the bilingual book explores Howell’s ‘pragmatic approach to living and designing’, featuring a series of images, including several shot by Howell herself. Her mantra, ‘good design is thoughtful and works well in everyday life’, provides the book’s common thread.

A continuation, of sorts, from Margaret Howell Houses (2006, also published by Shueisha), which has sold over 50,000 copies, the new book situates her work within her everyday life – most notably, her home in Suffolk, documenting the furnishings, objects and scenery which surround her while she designs her collections. Elsewhere, there is an exploration of the materiality which remains at the heart of her collections – including an insight into her work with British fabric producer Fox Brothers of Somerset – and her London Shirtmaking Workroom, which recently got an upgrade.

‘Photographs by Margaret Howell’ runs from 23 October – 15 November 2026 at Margaret Howell Wigmore Street, London. Margaret Howell: Life and Work and the 2027 Margaret Howell calendar are both available from 22 October 2026 at Margaret Howell Wigmore Street and from the Margaret Howell website.

If you like to go out regularly in London, particularly in the south and east, you might have noticed a number of new ‘listening bars’ in recent months. The concept, which originated in Japan, means that everything, from the way the space is insulated and designed to the nightly music curation, revolves around sound. Some of these bars have quickly become beloved and highly respected spaces, such as Waltz in Shoreditch, owned by Tokyo-born Gento Torigata, who was formerly the manager of Kwãnt. At Waltz, speakers take centre stage alongside the spirits and a meticulously curated menu in a warm, ambient space.

What separates a listening bar from a bar with good speakers?

While many of these bars are faithful to the original concept, there are, of course, things that differentiate them from the Tokyo-based neighbourhood spots. One is that the price point, naturally, has to be much higher for a bar to survive on the mean streets of London.

James Gilbody is the owner of Freaking Out The Neighborhood, a listening bar in Bangkok. He recently moved back to London, so he has a perspective on the proliferation of listening bars across two continents. ‘It’s definitely a trend globally, and Bangkok is no different,’ he says, telling me that listening bars even got their own awards category this year in the local lifestyle publication BK Magazine. Gilbody’s own motivation for opening one was that there weren’t many places that played the kind of music he and his partner enjoy: left-field jazz, rock, indie and punk. ‘Selfishly, we wanted a space where we could listen to our favourite albums on a nice system at full volume,’ he says.

Michael Sager is the owner and director of Equal Parts, a listening bar in Hackney that opened in 2023 and has since won several awards and a spot on best-of lists. When opening Equal Parts, says Sager, the brief was always sound and drinks in equal measure: ‘The listening element was structural from day one, not a differentiator we retrofitted.’ In his opinion, the popularity of listening bars is down to a simple fact: they give people permission to actually listen. ‘Most hospitality spaces use music as atmosphere management – something to fill silence and keep energy up. A listening bar inverts that. The music is the reason you're there, and the drink is what you hold while you're paying attention. For a certain kind of person, that's an enormous relief.’

Of course, if being a listening bar is something that gives one bar an edge over another, it would follow that some might be tempted to call themselves one without actually understanding what the concept means. Some spaces might do so without actually evoking the soul of some Shimokitazawa neighbourhood spot that’s been built around music.

Sager says that what differentiates a true listening bar is ‘intention and consequence’. At Equal Parts, they developed the sound system in collaboration with Audio Gold, and the room itself is lined with walnut and felt to cancel noise and enhance how sound moves through the space. They play exclusively vinyl, always full albums in order, because they believe in respecting the artist’s intention. The staff themselves are experts in selecting music, and, as Sager says, ‘Any bar can put on a good record. A listening bar is one where the music dictates the energy of the room, not the other way around.’

Gilbody agrees, adding that there are few authentic listening bars outside of Japan. ‘The main trend globally is people opening bars with nice speakers but not much music curation from the venue and not much listening happening,’ he says. ‘It’s Instagram friendly and an easy way to essentially rebrand a cocktail bar or have something else to market.’

What differentiates a listening bar, according to Gilbody, is that the experience should be quiet and cosy, something he and his wife Ki fell in love with. While some Japanese listening bars don’t even let you speak or go on your phone, he doesn’t think it needs to be that strict – but it should be intimate. ‘It should feel like you’re in someone’s living room listening to their record collection. The personality of the place and the curation of the music should ideally come from the owners,’ he says.

The explosion of listening bars across London might point to something beyond a fascination with Japan or simple trend-following. It is harder than ever to break even as a bar, especially a new one, in the city. That means, to stand out against the thousands of bars in London, you have to offer something unique. There’s a need for an experiential component beyond sleek interiors and well-balanced drinks. Guest bar takeovers, collaborations, events and themed menus have become the norm at the city’s top bars, and owners are getting increasingly creative.

Ryan Chetiyawardana, also known as Mr Lyan, is the award-winning owner behind Seed Library and, most recently, Lyaness in the Sea Containers on the South Bank. Lyaness is a bar with stunning interiors, imaginative drinks and an unbeatable view – but going above and beyond that, there are regular collaborations with global bars such as SIPS (Barcelona), Candelaria (Paris), Native (Singapore) and more through the Sunday Lyan series.

Bars innovating to thrive

‘With all our bars, we try to balance the fact that we're a destination venue with being as democratic and available to as many people as possible, functioning as a great neighbourhood bar can,’ says Chetiyawardana. ‘Innovation, excitement and togetherness are central pillars to our work, so we always wanted to go beyond what was more ubiquitous.’

When choosing collaborators, the team look to people who can push and inspire them. ‘Every business needs a point of difference, and having a unique voice is something that tends to resonate well in places where there are a lot of options,’ he says, adding, ‘As the expectations for drinking and dining out have risen, there have been more attempts to differentiate. But these are often copycat moves – the best venues have a USP that is honest and personal to them.’ Chetiyawardana agrees that the financial landscape and pressure on hospitality mean there needs to be more to your experience.

Andy Loudon is director of bars at the Rosewood Hotel in Covent Garden. Rosewood’s Scarfes Bar is uniquely innovative for a hotel bar, with playful themed menus and regular live music. ‘A great cocktail bar should engage all the senses, and live music has the power to transform a room in a way that no design element or drinks menu can,’ says Loudon. ‘Two guests can order the same cocktail on different evenings and have an entirely different experience because of the music, the crowd and the energy in the room.’

Given how competitive bars are today, that experience is essential. ‘The most successful bars understand that hospitality is ultimately about creating memories. That can be through music, storytelling, design, service, education or a sense of community. Guests rarely remember every ingredient in a cocktail, but they will remember how a place made them feel,’ says Loudon.

To survive today, success isn’t only about picking a trend or offering great drinks. Sager says that the best bars have a genuine point of view and hold it consistently. ‘The bars that are struggling are the ones that tried to be everything – great cocktails, great food, great music, great design – without a clear hierarchy of intent. Guests can feel when a venue knows exactly what it is. That coherence is increasingly rare, and increasingly what people seek out.’

Chetiyawardana adds that, as bar owners, it’s important to see one another as peers, not competitors. ‘Hospitality is only in competition with apathy and loneliness, and the more we can show that togetherness is an important factor of happiness, then the better venues do.’

London Fields might best be known as an after-hours destination for dive-bar martinis and small plates, but Circle13 is aiming to bring a new dimension to the area’s social offering. Recently opened by winemaker and cocktail veteran Marc Sarton Du Jonchay (A Bar with Shapes for a Name, New York’s Gage & Tollner) and former international pétanque player Monty Quaia, the space – taking residence in one of Mentmore Terrace’s railway arches – aims to bring the more than 100-year-old French sport to East London, along with an equal focus on Basque cuisine and low and no-ABV highballs.

'Pétanque has always had the reputation of being for older people, and that’s partly true but it’s also slightly unfair to the game because there are lots of subcultures playing and making it their own,' says Quaia. 'London Fields is already one of the hubs of pétanque in London. We're convinced that the future of the game is making it a bit younger, a bit more fun, and appealing to people like us and our friends.'

In keeping with this outlook, Circle13 has been designed with a thoroughly modern aesthetic in mind. Helmed by experiential designer Joseph Stone, whose work spans high-end residential design and product launches for brands including Google and Nike, its interiors have been curated to reflect the visuals of pétanque itself, where silver balls are thrown onto pitches made of gravel or grass.

'The image we’ve based everything on is as though you’re looking down at pétanque balls on a gravel surface. All of the materials have an earthy backdrop with steel cut through; the back of the bar has a sandy tile, but then the bar slices through it,' explains Stone. 'We’ve taken the elements of pétanque and expanded them, riffed off them, and tried to create a contemporary take on them all.'

Though gaming bars are increasingly rife in the city, Circle13 have approached their brand with a notably different ethos. 'The competitive socialising [scene] is great because having an activity makes it less about excessive drinking. But my biggest gripe is that they're generally quite tacky and the activity isn't coming from people that care about it, so it always feels a bit inauthentic,' says Quaia. Instead, the core mantra of Circle13 is “rebellious simplicity”. 'Petanque is so simple and it refuses to be more complicated, so we wanted everything to reflect that,' he continues.

Spatially, that means creating areas – a front seating space with cocktail tables, a bar area with high stools, pétanque pitches both indoors and out, and a secondary arch for events – that work individually but have a 'porosity' between them. 'When you're having a drink in the front area, there are screen breaks [around the pétanque pitch] at head height so you can see the game through them. Then we also worked with our friend Darran Prior from There’s Light on the expanded lighting design. We've tried to hero each area, illuminating the bar so it’s focused on groups of two, and making sure the pétanque pitches have a really nice diffused light so they have a kind of amphitheatre energy,' explains Stone.

'Pétanque can really be quite fun and chic so the idea is that you should have your sexiest picture in the pétanque pitch with the screens around it, with the lighting above when it's soft,' laughs Quaia. 'We want it to be on everyone's Hinge profile and for it to be known for being the place to get you a nice photo taken.'

The space has been designed in a modular fashion, with most features – from the screens around the pétanque pitch to the bar set-up in their second events arch – able to be rearranged depending on the night. Situated down a side road of E8, the frontage of the building has been kept open and welcoming, with floor-to-ceiling glass that allows the warm light of the interior to invite people in. 'We could have easily gone for the speakeasy feel, where you have a door and a single light and, as you go in, the world opens up in front of you. But because of it already being an industrial-feeling street, having that bigger aperture into the space was really important,' says Stone.

Staff uniforms are equally as considered, with plans for an adjacent merch line in place. A former tailor at Paul Smith, Quaia wanted to focus on 'streetwear with a sports background', working with Lithuanian streetwear brand Püga73 to develop a capsule collection of four pieces. 'Petanque has gone through many different phases, from the south of France rich guy with chinos and cigars, into something sporty with tracksuits, but none of them really spoke to us as modern Londoners,' he says.

The 'rebellious simplicity' also extends to their food and drink menu, headed up by Du Jonchay and chef Sean Donnelly. From the kitchen, Basque-centric pintxos are designed for snacking and sharing, featuring a variety of skewers, toasts and croquetas. Their pork belly and date skewer is a best-selling mix of savoury and sweet, while slices of home-baked Basque cheesecake make up their sweet offering.

Though their drinks menu still features ‘hard’ drinks, including a negroni sour and a mezcal toreador – a twist on a margarita using apricot – Circle13 have purposefully prioritised a less potent drinking culture. Here, non-alcoholic drinks are placed front and centre, with the option to add alcohol as a secondary concern. They’re purposefully kept at a very reasonable price point too: non-alcoholic cocktails are all priced at £6, with low-ABV highballs and spritzes coming in at £8.50.

'If you're not drinking, generally everything is based on non-alcoholic spirits which are more expensive in some cases than the boozy version. It makes no sense to us when there are already so many drinks in the world that don't have alcohol in them and are delicious,' Quaia reasons. 'We want it to highlight some of the ridiculousness of the industry, where £20-plus drinks and £8 pints are becoming increasingly more common.'

It all combines to create a venture that feels quietly radical, where a love of pétanque has brought about a new kind of bar, and a different way to socialise. 'We’re going to be launching different programs. We want to have Tuesday takeovers with different young chefs from Michelin kitchens, giving young people a chance to be creative and do something in the same way that we've been given a chance to open the space,' says Quaia. 'Rather than just trying to sell pétanque as a sport, we want it to be a social experience.'

Circle13, 369-370 Mentmore Terrace, London E8 3SD

From south London’s Half Pint Press comes this compact monograph focusing on one of the area’s most distinctive buildings. Thirty-Six Views of Dawson’s Heights offers up a portrait of the towering housing complex, two blocks containing nearly 300 flats, built between 1964 and 1972.

The lead architect for Southwark Council was Kate Macintosh, aged just 28 when she started work on the project. The stepped brick façade and carefully articulated massing, not to mention the spectacular views from the flats, have long made Dawson’s Heights a prominent local landmark, visible from far and wide.

With its reference to Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, this Thirty-Six Views features photographs by Michael Jones and a text by John Gray, who writes the South London Landscape History series of zines (available from Rivertones). According to the publishers, the book was a pandemic project. ‘Something we noticed when taking our lockdown walks around our local area was that you seemed to be able to see Dawson’s Heights from everywhere, and it looked different from every angle. From that thought, the idea for this book grew.’

Like the Japanese artist’s different perspectives on the mountain, Thirty-Six Views of Dawson’s Heights shows off the building from a scattering of localities, demonstrating its constant presence. Throw in the richness and complexity of MacIntosh’s architecture, which frustrates a simple reading of a single building on a hill, and you have a book that’s perfect for the south Londoner in your life.

Thirty-Six Views of Dawson's Heights, Michael Jones and John Gray, £16, The Half Pint Press, HalfPintPress.Wordpress.com, @HalfPintPress_London

Studio Iron, the concept store and gallery led by Isamaya Ffrench, operates in the spaces where the boundaries between art and design become hazy, curating a programme that puts a focus on objects and materiality at its core.

The Severe Mercy exhibition by British-American artist, photographer and director Robin Hunter-Blake, whose work spans multiple mediums, is a natural choice for Ffrench, who placed the works in a considered context in the space.

‘Robin’s work felt like a really interesting starting point because there’s something very emotional and visceral about it, but also a sensitivity to material, form and the body,’ Ffrench says. ‘I chose pieces from the Studio Iron roster that could respond to that in different ways, whether through material, tension, humour or sensuality. I wanted the whole thing to feel like a world rather than an exhibition of separate disciplines.’

For Hunter-Blake, who unites photography, kinetic installations and screen printing here, the exhibition presented a chance to bring ideas to life he had been mulling over for years. ‘The works explore emotion, time, and their relationship, with the aim of allowing the viewer to experience the work rather than analyse it,’ he says. ‘Their abstract nature and scale are intended to provoke questions, inviting the viewer into a process of interpretation. This is where the emotional, almost Rorschach-like quality of the work comes into effect, allowing each person to bring their own experiences, associations, and feelings to what they see.’

The works play on scale, material and proportion, cutting often ambiguous forms which invite the viewer to craft their own interpretations. ‘People tend to spend time with the aluminium works, studying them and allowing themselves to sit with what they evoke,’ Hunter-Blake adds. ‘I wanted to extend this experience across the exhibition, moving beyond observation into something more immersive. The screen prints explore a sense of emptiness, and the feeling of being hollow while continuing to exist, function, and move forward within the world. The installation aims to trigger feelings of overwhelm, love, tension, and impulsive expression.’

This is exactly the point, says Ffrench. ‘That’s a big part of what I want Studio Iron to explore. I want people to experience these things in a more instinctive way, to sit with them, touch them, live around them and form their own relationships with them. Hopefully you leave “Severe Mercy” thinking less about what category something belongs to and more about how it makes you feel.’

Robin Hunter-Blake: Severe Mercy, presented by Studio Iron at The Painting Rooms, Covent Garden, until 27 October

Imogen Kwok has made a career out of asking food to do unexpected things, with projects including trompe l’œil white chocolate pears for Loewe and a Georg Jensen installation featuring thousands of crystallised edible flowers. Further commissions for Loro Piana, Miu Miu, Hermès and Bulgari have made her one of design’s most sought-after culinary collaborators.

‘In my world, food is natural, beautiful chaos,’ she says. ‘It is defined by its inevitable undoing: constantly changing, unpredictable and irregular. Cooking is my way of carving out a moment of stillness within that, finding beauty just before the first bite, taste or touch.’

Her route into this world was unconventional. Born in Sydney and raised in New York, Kwok studied art history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and worked in galleries such as Lehmann Maupin before training at the Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Since settling in London in 2019, she has brought those disciplines together, constructing edible installations that resemble still-life paintings while retaining the flavour and technique of fine dining.

The British capital has proved to be an apt base. ‘Its energy matches the way I approach food,’ says Kwok. ‘There is this layered friction between the highly curated and the beautifully messy. London isn’t one singular vibe; it is a collection of little cities, all put together.’ Each neighbourhood has its own personality, while history and experimentation continually overlap: ‘You push through a crowd, turn a corner and find a pocket of beauty.’ Relocating here also recast her idea of what a chef could be. ‘It gave me the freedom to experiment,’ she says. ‘London let me be who I wanted to be.’

Imogen Kwok’s London

In Holland Park, The Cosmic House embodies the city’s eccentric streak. Charles and Maggie Jencks’ former home is a postmodern cosmos of celestial symbols, its architecture unfolding like an elaborate visual puzzle. ‘It is whimsical and disorientating in a wonderful way, like being inside a dream,’ says Kwok.

St James’s Dover Street Market is Kwok’s answer to wardrobe panic. ‘I tend to go there because I know I’m going to find something I love,’ she says. Nearby, Gallery Fumi speaks directly to her own practice, with a programme centring on designers who consider the process of making and the emotional life of a material. ‘That is the way I see food as well,’ says Kwok.

For dinner, Kwok chooses Mountain, Tomos Parry’s Soho restaurant. ‘It isn’t pretentious or fussy. The food is incredibly tasty,’ she says. ‘Tomos is known for fire-grilled fish and meat, yet there is also a very delicate hand in the way he handles ingredients.’

In south-east London, Eltham Palace stages the kind of historical collision Kwok values in the city. Built alongside the surviving Great Hall of a medieval royal palace is a 1930s art deco mansion, fusing several centuries into one improbable address. ‘I only discovered it recently, and it is very special,’ she says.

Her final choice takes her east to Cafe Oto in Dalston, a daytime restaurant that turns into a live music venue after dark. ‘They have a genuinely original programme,’ says Kwok. Like London itself, its appeal lies in the unexpected combinations.

Kwok particularly loves London in spring. ‘The sky fills with colour and light, and the streets teem with people, basking in the sun and drinking,’ says Kwok. ‘It makes winter worth enduring.’ And if London had a taste? ‘Creamy and briny.’

According to Imogen...

What is the best month to visit London? The end of June or early July. Or whenever it’s hottest, although that is unpredictable.

What should one wear to blend in? A chic hat – although that is probably better for standing out.

Favourite Londoner? Daniel Day-Lewis. Perhaps because I’ve just watched a run of his films.

What is the best way to make friends? Start a conversation with a stranger and stick with it. Londoners open up eventually.

Where is the best place to misbehave? Hackney.

For more recommendations, buy our London Travel Guide.

Film by Zack Melluish

‘In my teenage years, I enjoyed making my own clothes from paper patterns, but the one thing that was a real challenge was to make a shirt,’ the British designer Margaret Howell said in the 2021 Richardson-directed short, The Making of a Shirt. ‘A shirt has so many strong pieces. You have to halve and quarter to get it to set correctly, and then all these little details – at least two dozen pieces of pattern that go into making the shirt.’

It was in the early 1970s that Howell, then a young Fine Art graduate of Goldsmiths University, discovered, by chance, a men’s pinstripe shirt in a jumble sale; in the months that followed, she set about making her own, sourcing the perfect cotton from David & John Anderson, a traditional Scottish supplier of men’s dress shirt fabrics (materials remain central to Margaret Howell, which now spans a comprehensive men’s and women’s wardrobe). Later, in 2000, she established a workroom in Edmonton, north London, ‘Unit 7’, to create the perfect shirt – each hand-stitched by a single machinist and comprising up to 25 individual components.

Inside Margaret Howell’s new London workroom

In summer 2026, though, Howell established a new home for her superlative shirtmaking: Florentia Village in north London’s Harringay, a former textile manufacturing hub that has been recently renovated into an ‘industrial campus’ and co-working space by architecture firm Turner.Works. The new space marks what Howell calls a ‘commitment to British shirtmaking’, the spoils of which will be marked by a special swing tag and label marked ‘London Workroom’.

Embracing several light-filled rooms on the upper floor of Florentia Village, the move, says Howell, was to create a ‘more efficient, contemporary working environment’ that combines the traditional working methods established at Unit 7 (pattern pieces remain cut by hand; specialised machinists work on the components of shirts individually) with an increased capacity for production, meaning that a larger percentage of Margaret Howell’s shirts can be made in London (other shirts are made in factories in and around Florence, Italy, as well as other British factories). The 17 people currently employed at the workshop have more than 175 years’ combined experience in shirtmaking.

What is most unique about the facility, though, is the way that it sees through the entire life cycle of the shirt. All patterns are created in-house, going through rigorous prototyping across the various steps; as such, when it comes to producing the final shirts, the team is already familiar with the intricacies of the pattern. Visiting the factory gives further insight into this process, which, despite the relative simplicity of Howell’s designs – she is known for a sense of quiet restraint that means garments are rarely embellished or outwardly complicated – requires particular attention to its subtle details, like the lining up of checks and pinstripes on pockets, cuffs and collars so that they perfectly join and match (other processes include the pre-pressing of gauntlets and plackets, which allows machinists to get the shirts perfectly flat).

After the roughly 12,000 perfect stitches it takes to craft a single shirt, the pieces are completed with a final subtle flourish: a set of horn or mother-of-pearl buttons, before each shirt is pressed again and packaged for delivery.

The initial spoils of the new Florentia Village London Workroom are arriving in stores currently as part of the A/W 2026 season. This will include 12 designs in total, spanning both perennial Margaret Howell signatures – the ‘Basic’ and ‘Simple’ shirts are both currently being produced in the facility, alongside what the brand calls more ‘directional’ pieces, including the new ‘Stepped Hem’ and ‘Pin Tuck’ shirts. Rounding out the line-up will be two shirts crafted from leftover shirting cotton, ‘underpinning the brand’s continued commitment to responsible manufacturing’, says Howell.

margarethowell.co.uk

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is the saying, and it rings true for the home extension at this Victorian terraced house in Brockley, south-east London. Bolans Architects recently led the residence's loft conversion and elaborate refurbishment. However, it is the rear extension, unseen from the street, where a green ceramic ‘brick’ façade packs a punch and gives the project its name, Ceramic House.

Step inside Bolans Architects' new home extension, Ceramic House

Lanre Falase, architect at Bolans Architects, led the project. ‘A big part of the inspiration came from wanting to articulate the ceramic brickwork more decoratively, rather than simply using it as a flat finish,’ he explains. ‘That level of detail comes partly from my own self-build, Black Edge House, where every junction and detail really mattered. We also wanted the clients to have a constant connection to the garden, even from the deeper parts of the house. So the extension was not just about adding more space, but about drawing light, views and the garden back through the house.’

The façade is composed of arches, recesses and changing planes, which Falase unified with the smooth, green surface. ‘There is a real playfulness to it, but at the same time it feels quite sophisticated,’ he says. ‘I love the way the façade changes depending on where you are standing. From a distance, it reads as one composition, but as you get closer you start to notice the arches, the recesses, the different profiles and all the smaller details that make it work. It looks playful and almost effortless now, but there was a lot of work behind it.’

The project also included a reconfiguration of the property’s ground floor. A new utility room was introduced, along with a concealed pantry and a guest bathroom. The kitchen gained a new curved island, which draws the eye through the home and outwards towards the garden.

However, trying to make the most of the space without overcrowding it was difficult. ‘We had to ensure that every space had a clear purpose, while also understanding which rooms needed natural light and which spaces could work deeper within the plan,’ Falase told Wallpaper*. ‘The ground floor also had to work incredibly hard. We needed to fit in a utility room, pantry, kitchen, dining area and snug, alongside storage and circulation, without it feeling overcrowded. Everything needed to flow together naturally.’

The loft proved to be the biggest challenge. The architect explains: ‘The original houses do not really have enough headroom to form a comfortable loft conversion, so we had to lower the entire floor structure to make it work. At the same time, we needed not to compromise the character of the first-floor rooms or their relationship with the existing windows.’ This loft space is accessed via a new staircase, with cork flooring seen on the staircase and the upper level.

Achieving a cohesive result was also due to the close involvement of the clients, one of whom is a project manager at a large construction firm. His professional understanding of procurement, sequencing and the realities of delivering complex construction work proved valuable, along with a willingness to see the design through to completion.

Falase concludes, ‘As you move through the house, your eye is drawn towards the garden and the extension, but you also start to notice the different volumes and the way the fixed furniture helps shape the spaces. We did not want it to feel like one large open-plan room. There are different areas and moments throughout the ground floor, but they still connect. Hopefully there is that feeling of the house gradually opening up as you move through it.’

bolansgroup.com

‘I've always talked about slowness, or slow looking,' says London-born, Manchester-based artist Louise Giovanelli, on the eve of a major new show at London's White Cube gallery. ‘I see more and more of this tendency in painting – to really focus on directing attention into the canvas and not away from it. I'm contemplative. I really try and hold the gaze of the audience.'

It is a considered approach that's reflective of Giovanelli's practice as a whole, in both her subject matter, which captures the heavy slowness of anticipation, and in the oil paintings themselves. In the flesh, the richly worked pigments shine, glint and seduce, rewarding a second, and a third, look.

Louise Giovanelli presents ‘In the Light of False Suns’

Giovanelli, who developed her craft at the Manchester School of Art, graduating in 2015, doesn't make it easy for her viewers. She is fascinated by the spectacle, but resists the easy narratives that her motifs conjure up.

In a series of works focusing on curtains, there is a playfulness in the disparity between the expectation that something is about to be revealed and the access the closed curtains withhold. For Giovanelli, the concept of a curtain as something that shows, but also hides, is a complex one.

‘This idea of action having happened, or about to happen, means the curtains can be very sad things – or honest and happy, or very grand. They can also be very seedy things. They straddle so many different notions of class and geography; nightclubs, working men's clubs, hotels. They denote so many different things. I think that's why the curtains in particular are so frustrating to people, because of this meta narrative that they have,' she says. ‘They are just a painting, and it's super flat. I've realised fairly recently that it's something I do with all my work. Everything I paint is very close up to the surface. It feels very claustrophobic, almost aggressively pushed forward into the realm of the viewer.'

Throughout Giovanelli's work, there is no single-point perspective, but instead a tension between the figurative and the suggestion of abstraction. We are looking at what is real, but that might not be what we think it is.

‘Of course, the image matters, but, for me, it's probably at the bottom of the hierarchy,' Giovanelli says. ‘Or at least it should be when you're learning how to paint. Everything else is much more important.'

She cites Giorgio Morandi's lifetime spent painting clay pots. ‘There's nothing interesting really about a clay pot – but of course there is. There's the idea of light; different configurations, textures, formats, sizes; where the shapes are placed within the canvas, so that your eye doesn't ever fall out of the vista. All those things look nuanced, but they are very powerful.'

It is a universality reflected in Giovanelli's references, which may appear eclectic – there are motifs and techniques from the Renaissance, religious iconography, nods to theatre and pop culture filmography – yet share a focus on the concepts of worship and idolisation.

For the new work she is set to unveil at White Cube (Mason’s Yard, London, 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027), she draws links between these themes, as well as forming new connections between her existing paintings. ‘For the first time, I've included a face within a curtain image,' she says. ‘That's something I've never done before. It's almost like I create rules for myself, but then I see that almost as a challenge, so I break my own rule.'

Elsewhere, scale is distorted, and Giovanelli breaks another one of her rules by creating a wig painting (a series of her works that compactly frame wigs) that is bigger than a human head. When we speak before the opening, she is working from photographs of hanging carcasses of meat she took during a visit to an abattoir. ‘I know it sounds crazy, but if I can pull it off, it should be very seductive and beautiful. I want it to look like a seascape or landscape, very geological. It's quite a departure.'

Her technique, also, is developing. ‘I've been known to make works that are very thin, with no discernible brushstrokes, whereas this show has much more of them. It feels like I've found a new confidence.'

Ultimately, the power of paint to convey, magnify, and distort meaning continues to captivate Giovanelli. ‘What I'm trying to do is make paintings that initially register as very seductive and are very beautiful to look at – but there has to be an undercover or slightly macabre tone. There's a darkness in my work that takes a minute or so to really understand or appreciate. I'm old-fashioned. I love the idea of beauty. I think it should be beautiful – but beauty with an edge.'

Louise Giovanelli will be on show from 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027 at White Cube Mason's Yard, London SW1, whitecube.com

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Tiffany & Co's ‘Artist-to-Artist' programme at Frieze London (see more Frieze Week highlights) invites established artists to select up-and-coming creatives to present their work at the fair. This year, Yinka Shonibare has nominated self-taught Cape Town-based artist Unathi Mkonto. Spanning drawing, installation, sculpture and performance, his distinctive practice is driven by a keen interest in the possibilities of architecture, exploring, through sculpture, how to create a better standard of living.

Yinka Shonibare: Unathi Mkonto's work caught my attention because he has such a unique approach to minimalist art. Having lived in Cape Town, he's really interested in what's going on in South Africa. His method of presenting his work reminds me of a lot of minimalist approaches, but the difference is that he does have a subject matter, which is South African, whereas the minimalists were really focusing on the object itself.

Unathi Mkonto: I studied architecture, and that is part of my art now – in a newer way and with my own rules. I've been comfortable being in between the two, and never having to choose a side. In my practice, the work is sometimes theatrical. I'm interested in the environment that architecture gives – what people experience in the space and what is left behind. The voids and the in-between; everything can be habitable within my world in my architecture. A cardboard box can be a building, a drawing can be a building, you can live in anything. I'm exploring those theories and trying to stretch a language of architecture from the continent that is also inspired by nature, water and the land, and so I'm pulling from all those things.

YS: I've been looking at the work from London, thinking it's a unique approach to art-making. Is it architecture? Is it sculpture? I like that about the work. It refers to art-making in the past, but in an African setting. That kind of continuity of history interests me.

UM: I had been thinking about how agriculture could become the future of African architecture, because we draw from the ground and we learn from the soil. We know how it works, and for me, it's an important resource – rather than bricks and glass and things to build, the ground gives us so much. I've been thinking about what architecture could come out of the soil, and I've been thinking about trees. There is also an aquatic feel, with trees that are floating in water at the same time. It's a mix of the elements, a continuation of the sea, and the beach and the towers. What is the ancient knowledge that Africa has about soil? And how can Africans look more into the soil to create a language – because at the end of the day, our languages are going to come from the soil, they're going to come from nature.

YS: When people see this work at Frieze, I think they should be broad-minded and nourished by new ideas.

UM: I'm really looking forward to making a singular statement, and encountering this fast-moving audience. I was thinking about a work that is a singular language that can communicate, and also create a moment to pause. Something you can meditate on, something that's raw and quite honest, and that isn't overly done, but that attracts you for its honesty and its openness.

The Tiffany & Co ‘Artist-to-Artist' programme is on show from 14-18 October at Frieze London, Regent's Park

A version of this article appears in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

From the roof terrace of Cloud House, architect Peter Morris' new north London home, it is easy to see what inspired the project's name. A scalloped top edge painted in soft pink makes sitting on a lounger here feel like you are peeking at the Gospel Oak skyline through fluffy clouds of sweet candy floss.

The façade plays a part in this illusion too. Set on a quiet road off the southern edge of Hampstead Heath, on a little road that has everything from a Grade II-listed French school to an old church, Victorian homes and some modestly scaled new housing blocks, Cloud House stands out, for sure, cutting a distinct figure through its whimsical colour and shape.

It also somehow weirdly blends in. Its volumes follow the massing and rooflines of its adjacent buildings, and its arches echo the shapes found on the Grade I-listed St Martin's Church across the street. Were it not for its uncompromising soft pink and green hues, this project might have been an entirely different proposition.

Step inside Cloud House by Peter Morris

Cloud House's architect designed it as a showcase – a true expression of his own mood, vision and style. It is a very personal project, and one tackled with a lot of care precisely because of that. The scheme, in fact, comprises two semi-detached homes – one for his own family (he lives there with his partner Emily Kennedy, a producer) and the other belonging to clients who are about to start moving in.

The site contained an existing Victorian property, where the family previously lived, but which was getting increasingly worn and volatile – damp rising and urgent fixes needed. Morris decided to apply for it to be replaced, and after working with Camden Council over a few years, his permission was granted, and he embarked on Cloud House's design journey, which took ten years to complete.

The design changed significantly along the way, but only for the better, Morris explains – and it maintained its distinctive flair and individuality throughout the long-drawn process. 'The council saw my personal connection as a positive thing; they said my personality comes through with this house,' Morris recalls, wearing bright blue overalls and bold, round, black-rimmed glasses.

The fact that the street on this corner of Gospel Oak consists of a large blend of styles, from period to contemporary, and uses, including residential, educational and religious, helped. Cloud House contributes to an established diversity here. 'My work is typically more reserved than this. I might start colourful, but things get toned down quite a lot in the end,' he says. 'Here, I wanted to follow through with my own home.'

The long planning and construction process complicated things financially, but Morris was keen to remain true to his original vision. Some elements might have been adjusted, but important features – such as the arches and the colours – remained strong. Kind, crowdsourced help from the community ensured the painting and decorating finished on time.

What made things easier is that the house, a fairly conventional brick and concrete construction, is now clad with light polystyrene stone, a material that, Morris explains, is cost-effective but also highly functional, adding the building's thermal mass and insulation, while being easy to mould, lightweight and waterproof (it's been treated with rough render on top, making it near-indistinguishable from the typical peers).

Inside, the home spans three levels. A generous ground floor contains living spaces and Morris's home office. Bedrooms and bathrooms occupy the two upstairs floors, while a glass skylight at the top, right above the stairwell, opens to the roof terrace, a little sun trap that serves as the home's main outdoor space (a small courtyard downstairs is another open area – Morris plans to plant a herb garden here).

Bold colours, stripes and quirky details abound – just as you would expect, stepping inside a home that looks like a pink fairytale from the street. Painted arches on walls blend visually with arch-shaped doors, and round, ball-shaped plaster mouldings are reminiscent of the ones in Sir John Soane's Museum. Everything is decorated in Morris and Kennedy's personal style – 'It's the museum of Peter and Emily,' he smiles. No doubt, a good measure of success – a home truly reflecting its owners' spirit to the smallest detail.

Morris hopes for word to spread and more work in the Cloud House realm to come through for him, where he can let his imagination run wild and make someone else's dreams a reality too. 'The Cloud House is a colourful, joyful place, but it is also a statement about what residential architecture can be,' he says.

petermorrisarchitects.com

All photos by Will Pryce

As part of its special projects, London’s 2026 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House (15-18 October) will spotlight modernist artists from Africa and the diaspora.

Titled ‘West Wind’, the 1-54 Presents initiative takes its name from the 1966 song of the same title by Miriam Makeba, the legendary South African singer, songwriter and civil rights activist. The project is curated by Johannesburg-born South African-Portuguese art historian and researcher Nancy Dantas. It will celebrate the work of pioneering modern artists like Alexander ‘Skunder’ Boghossian, Bertina Lopes, Gerard Sekoto, Kofi Antubam, Sam Joseph Ntiro, Papa Ibra Tall and Uzo Egonu, presented by Hannah O’Leary Fine Art; Baya and Rafik El Kamel, presented by Selma Feriani Gallery; and Ibrahim El-Salahi, presented by Vigo Gallery.

'As we prepare for our 14th edition, I have been reflecting on how differently we understand artists when we place them within the histories they helped to shape, rather than at their margins,' says Touria El Glaoui, the founding director of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, in a statement. '“West Wind” allows us to look back with greater precision and to see the present differently. By bringing these generations into conversation, this edition places African artists where they belong, as authors of modern and contemporary art.'

Speaking of getting history right, writer and curator Folasade Ologundudu will present ‘(Re)Casting the Canon: From Lagos to London’, promoted as supporting the next generation of critical arts and culture writers to bring the hidden histories of African and African diasporan people into cultural discourse. The research-led initiative seeks to explore how contemporary African art history is shaped through collective memory, reflection, and writing via multi-day writing labs and a pop-up exhibition.

Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj, known for his colourful portraits and multimedia art that blends Moroccan culture with contemporary pop art and fashion influences, will present ‘My London Rockstars’, featuring a new generation of artists, musicians and designers shaping the city’s contemporary cultural scene, including Jorja Smith, Slawn and Central Cee.

Kianda Contemporary Art Project, a Johannesburg based art centre and curatorial studio will present work from the 1950s generation to the present day by artists based in Angola and in the diaspora, alongside artists from countries whose influence has been significant for the Angolan scene, which is influenced by colonial and post-independence contexts Mario Tendinha, Yola Balanga, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Alice Marcelino, Ia Sueki and Benigno Mangovo, with guest artists Levy Pooe (South Africa), Beré Magalhães (Brazil) and Emmany Koto (DRC). The Marcos Jinguba-curated exhibition is titled ‘Angola, Angolé, Angolema’, taken from a poetry collection by Angolan Arlindo Barbeitos.

A fifth project to look forward to is ‘Commodity/Couture’, a sensory installation that traces Ghanaian cocoa from farm to finished product, and the value that disappears in between, by Midunu Institute, an Accra-based cultural organization, founded by Ghanaian chef, author and artist, Selassie Atadika, and dedicated to Africa’s culinary heritage and food systems through research, cultural practice and craft.

The Talks Programme is a must-attend and will include panels such as an exploration of African Modernism with Nancy Dantas, The Future of African Art Collecting with Strauss & Co, a celebration of Addis Fine Art’s ten-year anniversary, Contemporary African Art After the Spotlight: Visibility, Value and the Institutions Still to Come, the book launch of Ô Cameroon! Modern and Contemporary Art and Artists From 1925 to Now by Ozong Agborsangaya-Fiteu, The New Institutional Moment: African Art After Visibility with Oliver Enwonwu, and Creatives, Collaborators and Catalysts: Contexts and Challenges of Championing Congolese Culture with The Defise Foundation.

As usual, there will be lots of artworks to see by contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora, presented by 40 galleries including first timers such as 16/16 (Nigeria), 193 (France/ Italy), Addis Fine Fine (Ethiopia), Affinity Gallery (Nigeria), Ellephant (Canada), Errm Art Gallery (Saudi Arabia) Filafriques (Switzerland/ Cote D’Ivoire), First Floor Gallery Harare (Zimbabwe), Gallery Misr (Egypt), LIS10 Gallery (Italy/France/Hong Kong), Maya Art Space (Lebanon) and THK Gallery (South Africa/Germany.)

1-54 London 2026 will be held at Somerset House from 15 to 18 October 2026

The symbiosis of art and fashion is well-documented and nowhere is this more evident than at Frieze’s various international editions, whereby the arrival of the contemporary art fair also heralds a slew of activations from fashion houses and brands as they seek to capitalise on the week’s cultural capital (and, indeed, high-spending clientele – it is often said that Frieze is like fashion week with more expensive handbags).

That said, this year’s Frieze London, which arrives in the capital this week (14-18 October), is noticeably lighter on such crossovers, paving the way for more meaningful partnerships between fashion and art. Case in point: Stone Island’s sponsorship of Frieze Focus, the arm of the fair which supports young galleries and their artists, or Dunhill’s continuing Frieze Masters Talks, which have yielded some genuinely meaningful conversations on the state of art and society in recent years (Tracey Emin was 2025’s highlight; this year, Es Devlin and Grayson Perry play headliners).

Elsewhere, Jonathan Anderson – a designer who has long cultivated a strong relationship with the art world – is hosting an exhibition of British artists and craftspeople at his Pimlico store, while the Lee Alexander McQueen-founded Sarabande Foundation will host an ephemeral pop-up in Selfridges, allowing shoppers to purchase the spoils of its artists’ work (and also view the artists at work, via a series of special open workshops). Dover Street Market will also host its usual bazaar-like Frieze celebration on Thursday evening (15 October 2026), including the relaunch of Comme des Garçons’ short-lived but influential magazine, Six.

Discover Wallpaper’s picks of the best fashion moments at Frieze London 2026 below.

Stone Island supports up-and-coming galleries through Frieze Focus

Earlier this month, Stone Island opened ‘Selected Works '982–'026’ at The Corner Shop, Selfridges, an ephemeral space designed by Willo Perron which puts the brand’s collectors in the spotlight (Stone Island has achieved a near-religious following; in the store, various collectors will display their archives as well as curate more recent products). Its opening coincides with the brand’s return as the partner of Frieze Focus, the fair’s ‘platform’ for emerging artists and galleries. Marking Stone Island’s 12th partnership with Frieze London, it will support each of the participating galleries with a bursary that allows them to show at the fair. Alongside, the brand will also reveal its latest Frieze uniform T-shirt, this time featuring an artwork by Senegalese artist Arébénor Basséne, represented by the Dakar-based gallery Selebe Yoon. Not working the fair? You can buy your own at Selfridges across the week.

‘Selected Works ’982–’26 Stone Island: The Collector Series’ runs until 6 November 2026 at Selfridges Corner Shop. For a full schedule of cultural programming, visit Stone Island’s website.

Dover Street Market celebrates Frieze 2026

Each Frieze Week, the London outpost of Adrian Joffe and Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market transforms into a veritable bazaar as participants from the worlds of fashion and art create a series of limited-edition offerings that go up for sale (alongside, on the evening of October 15, there will also be book signings, launches and other happenings unfolding across the Haymarket store). ‘Things to see, hear and stumble upon; with familiar faces and unexpected encounters,’ says the concept store, which will also offer refreshments from its in-store café, Rose Bakery. The event will also see the relaunch of Six by Comme des Garçons, a magazine which initially ran from 1988-1991, alongside appearances from the likes of Marc Quinn, Martine Rose, Matières Fécales, Michèle Lamy & Sissy Misfit, Ministry of Sound, Quil Lemons, Susie Cave, Tim Walker and Tremaine Emory.

Dunhill hosts its latest round of Frieze Masters talks

The Frieze Masters Talks, hosted by British heritage house Dunhill, offer respite from the frenetic main fair. In a specially curated space, the intimate conversations between a select group artists, curators and other cultural figures address a single theme – this year, ‘Breaking the Mould’. Curated for the second year running by Arturo Galansino, director general of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, participants include Wallpaper* October 2026 issue guest editor Es Devlin, Grayson Perry and Goshka Macuga, among others, discussing – across various more specific topics – how ‘historical art forms and materials can be reinterpreted for the present’.

'The title of this year's talks programme, “Breaking the Mould”, suggests not only the possibility of challenging conventions, but also the need to rethink the forms through which we construct, transmit and interpret culture,’ says Galansio. ‘This idea runs through each of the conversations, bringing together some of today’s leading artists, architects, museum directors, curators, art historians and writers. Their diverse perspectives will create a dialogue between contemporary practice and historical research, personal experience and institutional responsibility.’

For the full schedule and to book tickets, visit the Frieze website. The talks run from 14-17 October 2026.

JW Anderson curates a new exhibition in its Pimlico store

Throughout his career, Northern Irish fashion designer Jonathan Anderson has forged a close relationship with the art world – most recently, as creative director of Dior, whereby his Los Angeles Cruise show featured a collaboration with Ed Ruscha, while a Paris exhibition celebrating his haute couture debut put his designs in conversation with the ceramic works of Magdalene Odundo. To mark this year’s Frieze Week, he has curated an intimate exhibition at his eponymous label’s store in Pimlico, titled ‘A Composition’ (it is staged with American Express Platinum). The presentation, which will sit among the store’s eclectic curation of fashion and craft objects, centres around 30 glass wind chimes by Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, developed for the show, alongside selected works from London’s White Cube Gallery, including pieces by Akiko Hirai, Mary Stephenson and Shawanda Corbett. It will be a busy week for Anderson, who will also launch a new collaboration with Australian footwear brand Ugg, accompanied by a campaign starring multi-hyphenate musician Dev Hynes.

Sarabande’s House of Bandits pops up in Selfridges

Sarabande, the charitable foundation which was founded by Lee Alexander McQueen to provide subsidised studio spaces for young creatives, has helped forge the careers of some of London’s best young designers, among them Torishéju Dumi, Paolo Carzana, Aaron Esh and Stefan Cooke, among others (Sarabande also supports those in other disciplines, including art and design). Coinciding with Frieze Week, House of Bandits, the institution’s in-house gallery – headquartered in Sarabande’s recently opened Tottenham space – is staging a two-week pop-up in Selfridges, bringing the anarchic spirit of the foundation to the London department store. Expect ‘graphic, colourful, intriguing and innovative’ works from current Sarabande artists and alumni, including Daisy Collingridge, George Wilkin, Rizza Hadid and Jack Laver, among others. Throughout the event, various artists will also be moving their studios to the new Ground Floor Art Space, allowing shoppers to see their work in progress.

Until 18 October 2026 at the Duke Street entrance, Selfridges.

‘The 90s: Fashion and Art’ continues at Tate Britain

Former Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful has turned curator for a new exhibition at Tate Britain, which traces the relationship between fashion and art during a definitive decade – the 1990s. Opening last week with a starry gala, the exhibition continues throughout Frieze Week and into the new year, attempting to capture ‘the freedom, chaos and creativity’ of the era. Cue works from the likes of Juergen Teller (who created a limited-edition Wallpaper* cover to celebrate the exhibition’s opening), Steve McQueen, Damien Hearst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and the like, alongside fashion from Alexander McQueen (his eponymous house also features as main sponsor), Vivienne Westwood and Hussein Chalayan). ‘It's just my view of the 90s, with my friends, great artists that I was lucky enough to grow up with and be around, have a couple of drinks with,’ says Enninful in the November issue of Wallpaper*. ‘So it was really a pleasure, working with people who were so great at what they did, and redefined a whole decade.’

'The 90s: Art and Fashion’, curated by Edward Enninful, is on show until 14 February 2027 at Tate Britain, London SW1.

Growing up in Japan as the daughter of two artists, Noe Kuremoto was raised around her father’s painting practice and his job at the local university, where she would join him on campus to hang out with artists, musicians and poets. ‘I thought it was very normal to see adults who are so enthusiastic about life, so I was very surprised to find when I went to school that not all parents were so passionate about their jobs,’ she recalls, hinting at the smell of oil painting from her father’s work, or her mum always playing the piano in the background.

Despite this natural connection to the artistic practice, she was fascinated by the freedom of the London art community and moved to the city to study at Central Saint Martins. ‘I wanted to leave the Japanese-ness behind,’ she explains. ‘The Japanese art community is much more academic, technically driven, led by more traditional aesthetics.’ Through the magazines that her parents had at home, she had discovered a different kind of vibrancy: Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Sara Lucas, Damien Hirst, Gilbert and George were all working in London at the time, and it felt exciting. ‘I was born in this little island: now I wanted to look for something more.’

Her chosen medium, ceramics, was also one that she was able to explore freely in London. If you want to be a ceramicist in Japan, she explains, you have to shadow a master and learn the skill as an apprentice, without much freedom to develop your own practice. But in London, Kuremoto started working freely on her own pieces – clay objects that feel totemic and ancestral, based on abstract compositions featuring bulbous forms, anthropomorphic elements and often a sense of symmetry.

Her studio set-up, she insists, is ‘very humble. My most important tools are hands, water, fire and clay. A ceramic studio can be fancy, but mine isn’t.’ Currently based in east London, she is in the process of building a studio in a forest in Lithuania, where her husband’s family is from. But, she admits, the simple set-up of her practice also means she can work almost anywhere.

Despite establishing her work in a context so geographically and culturally far from Japan, she wound up establishing a connection with her native country that transcends her craft. Mysticism is at the heart of Kuremoto’s practice, and the connection with such an integral part of Japanese life and culture doesn’t feel casual. ‘Perhaps when I started to face the complexity of life, I looked for ancestral wisdom; that mythology felt dusty when I was in Japan, it felt like shackles to my teenage self when I was trying to figure out who I want to be,’ she explains. ‘Now, that same mysticism gives me a map to figure out life’s most complex moments.’

Discover Noe Kuremoto's work at PAD 2026

At PAD London 2026, she is bringing significant new bodies of work that reflect how the complexity of her heritage and her life merge in an inquisitive, personal way. ‘Project Crane Wife’, a series of black stoneware sculptures shaped like vessels with tall necks and elongated handles, refers to one of Japan’s oldest folk tales. ‘Like all great folk tales, The Crane Wife carries many layers of meaning,’ she says. ‘But the lesson that remains closest to my heart is this: the tragedy is not losing what we love. The tragedy is that humans only understand the true value of a gift once it is gone.’ For Kuremoto, the allegory brings to mind her elderly mother, back in Japan, and the collection serves as a ‘meditation on the impermanence of true gifts’; the three pieces in the collection all feature a tear, added by the artisan during the process, to make them veritable in-between objects.

‘Project Shodō’, meanwhile, is a series of black, unglazed sculptural objects through which Kuremoto explores the dichotomy of her roles as a mother and an artist, and how these can (or cannot) coexist. The series is named after the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy: ‘I vividly remember the smell of deep black sumi ink while a brush swept gracefully across white paper. As youngsters, we had to write kanji characters every morning that anticipated our day ahead. We were told the process would engrave an ideal into our minds, and help us to make it real,’ she explains. That practice and habit became useful to her as the mother of young children: ‘I get just three sacred hours in my studio per day,’ she says. ‘To make the most of precious time, and distance myself from the failure to attain my ideals, I decided to treat my clay like shodō – to do everything in one go. I committed to make one “drawing in the air” with clay, each and every single day. Good or bad, it didn’t matter. In fact, allowing myself to produce bad, ugly work was a game changer.’

Ancestral Japan also recurs in her final project shown at PAD this year. ‘Jōmon’ nods to the intricate fertility vessels of the eponymous Japanese era (between 14,000 and 300 BCE). ‘It remains astonishing that such complex, expressive forms were created using nothing more than wild clay and pit fire,’ she says. ‘In a time defined by hunting and gathering, when survival was the primary, daily concern, the Jōmon people invested energy in something far greater than individual biological need.’ Kuremoto explores the concept of the Jōmon vessel in a contemporary guise, drawing from her personal experience of and approach to motherhood. ‘Motherhood cracks you open. It gives urgency, depth, a new way of seeing. But society rarely sees this labour as real,’ she says. ‘If your work isn’t paid, it barely exists. We measure output, not care. Invoices, not endurance. I make fertility vessels for women walking this impossible line.’

Guiding her practice is something that Kuremoto's father told her as she was about to leave Japan for London, age 17. 'He said: "If you really want to be an artist, you have to bring light to the world." I didn't understand it at the time, but today I firmly believe that is my mission, and every artist and designer's mission is to bring light to the world.'

Noe Kuremoto is at Pik'd, Booth B7, and Galerie Boketto, Booth A20, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

This Clerkenwell house represents the near-complete remodel of an existing property - the keen-eyed reader might recognise it as the home of designer Roksanda Ilincic ten years ago. Now reinvented for a family of three with a passion for travelling and art, the building was fully redesigned by architect Pauline Gidoin of MM Studio Interior.

The current owners had been living in the home for eight years, using a mix of the furniture they owned prior to purchasing it, and the original project's existing structure. Over the years, they realised they needed to fine tune the space and upgrade it to their own personal needs. They called upon Gidoin to optimise and tailor design their space for their specific purposes.

'Although the architecture was very strong, the rooms didn't necessarily feel connected to the scale or character of the house. In the large open-plan ground floor in particular, pieces felt as though they were floating within the space rather than defining it,' the architect says.

'Just before they contacted us, they had completed two infill extensions to the upper bedrooms, creating two much more usable rooms that now needed to be properly designed. It felt like the right moment to look at the house in its entirety.'

Gidoin developed a design working closely with Tate Joinery, who worked on all the bespoke storage elements throughout. The aim was the balance the property's bold looks with functionality, and bring warmth to the strong architectural interior.

She explains: 'We described the design language early on as Brutalist and minimalist. I didn't want to fight the architecture or fill the house with objects. Instead, the idea was to work with a relatively restrained number of pieces, but make each one count through proportion, texture and materiality.'

'Spatially, each floor presented almost the opposite problem. The ground floor was extremely generous and needed to be broken down into distinct living, dining and music areas without introducing walls. Upstairs and on the lower-ground floor, the challenge was much more about making every centimetre useful, incorporating storage and responding to very different qualities of natural light. We used furniture placement, rugs, lighting, art and bespoke joinery almost architecturally to define those spaces.'

It was this challenge, the need to rebalance and fine-tune between large, flowing and cosy spaces, that helped define the project, the architect explains: 'I think that contrast ultimately became one of the strengths of the project: some spaces needed to be given more definition, while others needed to work much harder within a smaller footprint. The bespoke elements helped us solve those very different conditions, while the consistent material palette and the clients’ art collection create continuity throughout the house.'

Natural materials throughout, particularly travertine in both refined and rougher finishes, oak, walnut, limestone, leather and chrome, were used in an honest way, exposed and left 'brutalist' to add texture to the spaces. Instead of using lots of different finishes, the team worked with a restrained family of materials repeatedly, simply altering their scale, texture and application from room to room. This allowed the whole to feel consistent but also varied and truly bespoke.

Chris D’Sylva has been taking over Notting Hill, one food business at a time, since 2019: first with Smart Grocers, the Fish + Meat Shop and Supermarket of Dreams, then with Dorian Bistro and Eel Sushi. At Nakimushi, he’s stuck to Japanese but dropped the sushi and entrusted the £2m townhouse conversion to the two chefs running the place. Robin Kosuge and Yuji Shimokawa Kelly made a name for themselves with the Robin’s Ramen and Urchin residencies respectively and now share a permanent home at Nakimushi, just off Notting Hill Gate, with ramen at street level and a wider-ranging Japanese menu upstairs.

Wallpaper* dines at Nakimushi, London

The mood: Tokyo in a Kensington terrace

Jack Architecture & Design, the London practice founded in 2020 by Jonathan Richardson, has combined a spare Japanese sensibility with British heritage details. The original brick façade survives, with the shopfront painted oxblood and a noren curtain hung above the door. The deep red carries through all three floors in hand-glazed Kit Kat tiles and the leather banquettes lining the walls. Everywhere else is brushed pine, with parquet underfoot and brass around the edges: check out the clever little table lamps which can be unscrewed and repositioned.

‘We wanted to move away from the identity of sushi restaurants,’ explains Shimokawa Kelly. ‘The hinoki you get in most of them has a very cold feeling to it. It’s much more enjoyable to eat in a warm environment, because the food looks better – and so do the guests and the staff.’

The open kitchen takes up half the ground floor, kitted out with a built-to-order grill to handle proper robata. A men bako – the box a ramen shop keeps its noodles in – has been made by a friend of Kosuge’s, carrying his Japanese nickname where the noodle factory’s name would usually go.

The other half is occupied by a central communal table and more seats by the window; upstairs is the calmer 25-seat dining room and a tiled bar. Look out for the glass-walled cold room by the stairs to the loos, where whole ducks and Ibérico Duroc pork are hung to age.

The food: Ramen and then some

Downstairs is designed for in-and-out quick eats of ramen such as Kosuge's signature chashu pork belly bowl, a Basque chicken broth with noodles cut to his own wheat-and-rye specification by Komugi Noodles in Manchester, and a ramen egg steeped in Yorkshire Tea and soy.

Upstairs is meant for a more leisurely exploration of a menu that, like Kosuge and Yuji Shimokawa Kelly, is half Japanese, half London. Corn tempura arrives wrapped in a crackling sheet of nori and dusted with salt made from fig leaves foraged a few streets away. There is quail tempura with apricot purée and a jerk-spiked tendashi dipping sauce, and a taco – ‘tako’ being Japanese for ‘octopus’ – whose buckwheat shell is enriched with fat left over from rendering the ramen’s chicken, the octopus brined and grilled under red pepper and plum. And you can order ramen up here, too.

It’s serious Japanese food for people who don’t take what they eat too seriously – the karaage tastes like the best chicken nugget in west London – but do care about the deliciousness of what they put in their mouth, whether that’s a luscious grilled Ibérico pork loin with an umami kiss of red almond miso, or a glass of aged junmai saké brewed to a recipe from 1703.

Nakimushi is located at 7 Kensington Mall, London W8 4EB, United Kingdom

Creativity may be instinctive, but it can also be passed down through the way parents think, create and teach. This is the story of Manuel Bano, the Mexico-based designer who runs his own practice and is also part of the collectible design studio EWE Studio. 'My love for design comes from my parents,' shares Bano. 'My father, a designer, and my mother, an artist, shared a studio in our home in Valencia, Spain. Later, they both taught at the university where I studied: my mother taught art and my father product design.'

Early in his career, Bano interned with London-based designer Magnus Long learning the workings of industrial design and the nuances of producing commercial furniture for brands. But a year later, he was ready for an adventure of his own and set his sights on Mexico. He began speaking with Héctor Esrawe, a designer and architect who invited him to join his studio in Mexico City in 2013. Bano spent several years there in various roles, and their collaboration eventually grew into a partnership, and in 2017 they, along with Age Salajõe, founded EWE Studio, a collective dedicated to exploring Mexico’s rich natural materials, techniques and craftsmanship (previously spotlighted by Wallpaper* when they showed at Dubai’s Gallery Collectional in 2024).

So, what is it about the country that kept Bano hooked? 'Mexico inspires me in every field, from architecture and cinema to music and, of course, food. Craftsmanship is alive everywhere, from small carpentry shops to stone workshops, and people continue to make things using techniques passed down through generations.'

His love of making deepened during the pandemic, when the ‘OBJ’ collection began; an evolving body of work. Bano found himself drawing and exploring new ideas, even as workshops remained closed. 'I had a friend who had a laser-cutting machine. It was essentially the only workshop where I could produce something,' he says. He made that constraint his starting point, creating the ‘OBJ-01’ table lamp – the first piece he produced independently. The series has since grown to include a floor lamp, chair, bench and stool, while his fascination with metal – stainless steel, brass and oxidised steel – has remained constant.

'What I value about working with metal is the directness of the process. In many of my pieces, I can work with a single material, and I like knowing from the beginning how the finished piece will look. There is an honesty to metal. That doesn’t always happen with stone, glass or other materials, where surprises can occur along the way,' says Bano.

Then came copper. 'As I worked more with steel and brass, I began to encounter certain limitations in achieving the forms and textures I was looking for,' shares Bano. 'My friend, artist and designer Brian Thoreen, introduced me to a workshop where he was producing his pieces in copper, a material I was already curious about. I fell in love with it immediately. The possibilities of copper felt endless.'

Thoreen introduced Bano to Raúl Rauda, an artisan in Santa Clara del Cobre, a town whose copperworking tradition dates back to the pre-Hispanic era and is rooted in Purépecha craftsmanship. In fact hand-hammered copper shapes around 250 local workshops, filling the town with the constant, rhythmic sound of metalworking. There, Bano realised how this recycled copper could be cut, bent, stretched and hammered, opening up possibilities that led to pieces including the ‘OBJ-12’ dining table, ‘OBJ-10’ cabinet and more.

Today, Bano divides his time equally between his own practice and EWE Studio. 'Some designers love to discover a piece through experimentation,' avers Bano. 'My process is almost the opposite: I tend to know what I’m looking for from the beginning, and from there the work is about refining and resolving the piece.'

At PAD London 2026, he is eager to hear how people respond to his work, particularly as he is based on the other side of the world. He is pleased to have found an exhibition partner in Objects with Narratives. As people will notice in his work, there is something very romantic about materials ageing and changing over time. 'I think many designers can relate to that, regardless of the materials they work with.'

Manuel Bano is at Objects with Narrative, Booth A8, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square.

In Kentish Town, the slightly sleepier side of Camden, a newly renovated Victorian residence artfully blends midcentury interiors with characterful, original period details. The clients, a designer and creative director working in film, had owned the building's upper maisonette for 14 years; when the lower flat became available, they saw the potential for a project.

Step inside this modern Victorian conversion

Working closely with Architecture for London (which also recently completed a Neo-Georgian Islington house), the couple converted the Victorian structure's two separate flats back into one. The transformation wasn’t intended to be a huge revelation, however; instead, it whispers.

‘The clients loved the Victorian character of the house, so we tried to retain and reuse as much of the existing fabric as we could,’ explains Sophie Armstrong, senior architect at Architecture for London. ‘Instead of choosing between old and new, we wanted the two to sit side by side comfortably. The house had been divided into two flats, so much of the work was undoing that and restoring the generosity of a single family home.’

The big focus of the project was for the client’s midcentury furniture to fit effortlessly into the space. The architecture firm completely reconfigured the space. The former maisonette’s kitchen, on the first floor, was converted into a laundry and shower room, while the second floor was reconfigured, including moving the stairway, to create a spacious main bedroom.

The roof was replaced with a new loft conversion, which allowed space for two additional bedrooms and a large bathroom. The ground floor opens up into a spacious Shaker-style kitchen and a generous living and dining room.

Says Armstrong, ‘The exposed timbers and large rooflight [in the kitchen] give a generous sense of height, and the metal-framed glazing, reclaimed brick and Portland stone lintels help it sit seamlessly against the existing house. The kitchen is at the heart of the plan, and the lowered snug beside it adds a cosy pocket of space.’

Achieving this result wasn’t as effortless as it seems, as the biggest challenge was converting the two flats back into one while the clients continued to live on site. There was also a planning challenge.

Armstrong tells Wallpaper*, ‘The house lies within a conservation area, so external alterations had to respond sensitively to the area and meet the council's requirements. Every visible change, from the rear extension to the lead-clad loft dormers, needed to sit naturally within the character of the Victorian terrace.’

The house feels unfussy and welcoming. ‘It's a home for a working, creative family, so it should feel relaxed, rather than precious,’ shares Armstrong. ‘Tactile materials like timber and marble bring warmth, and the light-filled kitchen at the centre of the plan draws people in. It should feel like a Victorian house that has been quietly and thoughtfully refined, rather than being completely transformed.’

architectureforlondon.com

Frieze Week is back in London, and with it comes the annual rush of openings, exhibitions, performances and parties. Across the city, galleries, museums and a few less predictable venues are making the most of the crowds descending for Frieze London and Frieze Masters.

This year, Yuko Mohri has turned the Barbican’s cast-offs into a wonky concert of leaks, clangs and whirring machinery, while Esteban Jefferson is taking on the British Museum from a gallery just around the corner. Rebecca Warren returns with her first London show in 15 years, Issy Wood puts herself in the frame at the National Portrait Gallery, and Georg Baselitz’s battered Heroes get their first dedicated UK exhibition.

At night, things get a little less civilised. Cult queer party Anal House Meltdown takes over Bolding Gallery for one night only, while at London Performance Studios, Sam Cottington’s new play The Front follows two people who discover, somewhat inconveniently, that they can’t die. Here are ten things worth seeing, doing and staying out late for during Frieze Week 2026.

The Front at London Performance Studios

A trip to the theatre might not be the most obvious addition to a Frieze Week itinerary, but The Front makes a convincing case. The new play was written by artist and writer Sam Cottington, who has recently exhibited at Nir Altman in Munich and Ginny on Frederick in London, and produced by London Performance Studios, with multidisciplinary artist Middleton Maddocks as production coordinator.

Showing for two nights only (16 and 17 October) at London Performance Studios in South Bermondsey, The Front follows its protagonists Carol and Stephen, who meet and discover that, for reasons unclear to either of them, they are unable to die. Their lives unfold across more than a century, taking them from Belgium and the Western Front at the close of WWII to an isolated farmhouse in Bavaria as the Second World War escalates, and finally to the outskirts of present-day Berlin. Cottington describes the play as an exploration of how history feels, rather than how it was.

Yuko Mohri at Barbican

Yuko Mohri has spent a fair bit of time rummaging around behind the scenes at the Barbican. During a residency earlier this year, the Japanese artist explored its workshops and back rooms, salvaging old wires, metal scraps and street lamps that once belonged to the building. Now some of that material has found its way back inside for In Concert, her new installation taking over The Curve.

Mohri, who represented Japan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, is known for kinetic sculptures that combine everyday objects with less stable forces such as water, air, gravity and magnetism. Here, cymbals clang according to water pumped through dangling tubes, a triangle held by a spoon occasionally announces itself, and a firehose drip feeds into a lampshade. Elsewhere, water leaks through a stack of bathroom sinks while fans blow against lengths of old wiring. Savage machinery this is not. Mohri is more interested in things leaking, failing, being patched up and starting again, turning the Barbican’s own cast-offs into a wonky concert for a building currently undergoing its own repairs.

Rebecca Warren at Maureen Paley

It’s been 15 years since the British artist Rebecca Warren last had a show in London. Maureen Paley has been there from the beginning, giving Warren an early exhibition in 2000, years before she was nominated for the Turner Prize, elected as a Royal Academician and awarded an OBE for services to art.

Now, 25 years later, Warren is back at the gallery with an entirely new body of work spanning both the gallery’s Bethnal Green spaces. Warren is best known for sculptures in bronze, clay, and steel that play fast and loose with the human figure, shifting between the bodily, erotic, cartoonish and abstract. For this exhibition, she imagined making a retrospective of her own work, but as a ‘slightly different version’ of herself, allowing forms and ideas from earlier periods of her practice to reappear in new works. At its centre is There Will Be Another You (2026), a life-size bronze reclining female figure whose body seems to melt and morph, with exposed sinews and wires, two right arms and no left. Go to East London to see this show. You won’t regret it.

Esterban Jefferson at Herald St

At the Acropolis Museum in Athens, empty spaces have been deliberately left for sculptures currently held in the British Museum. These gaps became the starting point for ‘British Museum’, Esteban Jefferson’s first solo exhibition with Herald St, fittingly staged at the gallery’s Museum Street space, just around the corner from the museum itself.

Jefferson photographed the empty spaces and plaster casts standing in for missing sections of the Parthenon Frieze, before following the objects to London. At the British Museum, he became interested not just in the artefacts but the visual clutter around them: air purifiers, fans, temperature monitors and other machinery used to preserve the collection. These details appear alongside ancient objects in a new series of paintings, drawing attention to the systems through which museums display, preserve and lay claim to their collections.

Frieze Artist-to-Artist: Paul Robas (Alice Amati) nominated by Louise Giovanelli

For her first appearance at Frieze London, Alice Amati presents a solo booth by Vienna-based Romanian painter Paul Robas, invited to take part in the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section. Now in its fourth edition, the initiative invites seven established artists to each nominate a peer they believe deserves wider recognition.

Robas was nominated by British painter Louise Giovanelli (who co-founded Apollo Painting School with Amati). Robas, who studied in Cluj-Napoca before completing his MFA in Vienna, is interested in what happens to an image as it moves between digital and physical forms. Starting with photographs, both found and his own, he edits, collages, and projects them before translating them into paintings.

His technique is particularly cool, working with encaustic, an ancient technique using wax that he encountered through his study of Roman-period Fayum mummy portraits. Combined with oil, ink and acrylic, the wax gives his paintings their ghostly, fading quality. Elsewhere in Artist-to-Artist, look out for South African artist Unathi Mkonto at Goodman Gallery, nominated by Yinka Shonibare, and Eusung Lee at Seoul’s Cylinder, selected by Ayoung Kim.

Anal House Meltdown x Bolding Gallery club night

This is one night and one night only. And judging by how other events in the series went down, it’s worth rearranging whatever you had planned for Friday 16 October. Anal House Meltdown (AHMD) is landing at Bolding Gallery for Frieze Week. The cult queer party was started in 2011 by artists Prem Sahib, Eddie Peake and George Henry Longly, and has since developed a history as itinerant as it is unpredictable.

Previous incarnations have materialised everywhere from Dalston basements to the volcanic island of Stromboli. For Prem Sahib, a British-Indian artist whose work often draws on the architecture and material language of queer spaces, the party began as another form of space-making – one that takes place on the dance floor. This time, Mayfair’s Bolding Gallery provides the setting, with Barkley Bandon, Lali, Eddie Peake and Debonair playing into the night. There’s no guest list, the bar is cheap and doors open at 8pm. Don’t leave it too late.

Daniel Crouch Rare Books at Frieze Masters

The late Andrew Edmunds left his name to one of Soho’s best-loved restaurants, a candlelit institution on Lexington Street. Less well-known, perhaps, was the extraordinary collection he assembled alongside it. Over half a century, Edmunds, who was also an art dealer and collector, amassed more than 10,000 caricatures and satirical prints dating from around 1680 to 1850. At Frieze Masters, Daniel Crouch Rare Books (specialists in antique maps, atlases, plans and sea charts) presents highlights from the collection, including more than 1,200 prints by James Gillray, 300 works by William Hogarth and over 500 by Thomas Rowlandson.

Sex, food, fashion, politics, race, empire and national rivalry all get the treatment, with works ranging from Gillray’s The Plumb-pudding in Danger to the only known copy of a 1779 satire on Mrs Phillips’s sex shop. Savage, gossipy and frequently ridiculous, the prints are ancestors of today’s political cartoons and internet memes.

Es Devlin at Design Museum

Few people have shaped the way we experience live performance quite like Es Devlin. Over three decades, the British artist and designer has worked across theatre, opera, art, fashion and music, creating stages and kinetic sculptures for everyone from Beyonce and Adele to U2, as well as the Olympic Games.

Now the Design Museum is bringing it all together for ‘Es Devlin: Other Worlds’, the first European retrospective of her 30-year practice. It begins with a reconstruction of Devlin’s London studio, complete with books, tools, and maquettes, before opening out onto Come Home Again, her illuminated drawings of 240 species of plants and animals found in London. At its centre is 30-Year-Desk, where 30 revolving projects including her work on The Lehman Trilogy and the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show, before a bright red passage leads to Infinite Library, a kinetic installation of more than 2,000 books. Devlin describes herself as an ‘everythingist’. ‘I feel like, these days, you need somehow to find permission to be an everythingist because it feels like there’s a sort of pressure always to find your thing,’ she says. ‘And actually, maybe the thing is everything.’

Issy Wood at National Portrait Gallery

So the National Portrait Gallery is launching a new programme devoted to contemporary portraiture, and Issy Wood is first up. Born in North Carolina and raised in the UK, Wood paints people, body parts, clothing, animals, and anything else in her studio, working on linen as well as less conventional surfaces including velvet and clothing, often cropping her subjects so tightly that portraiture and still life begin to overlap.

Wood has quickly become one of the most recognisable painters of her generation. She was taken on by London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa before graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2018, and has since developed a practice that extends beyond painting into music and writing. For the NPG, the focus turns to Wood herself. Eleven self-portraits made since 2020 are being shown together for the first time, seven of them never previously exhibited in public. She has described the paintings as substitutes for photographs of herself, with the painted image standing in for the real one. Three self-portraits have already entered the NPG’s collection, making it the only UK national institution to hold one.

Georg Baselitz at Thaddaeus Ropac

Georg Baselitz was 27 years old when, over the course of a single year, he made around 60 paintings, 130 drawings and 38 prints. At the centre of this burst of activity were his Heroes series: paintings of monumental, battered figures, barefoot and dressed in rags or torn military uniforms, stranded in ravaged landscapes.

Now, for the first time in the UK, an exhibition devoted exclusively to the series brings together key works from this formative period at Thaddaeus Ropac. Having left East Germany for West Berlin, Baselitz found himself caught between the state-sanctioned realism of the East and a West Germany swept up in the newfound optimism of the so-called German Wonder. It was the summer of 1965 that Baselitz began the Hero paintings, shortly after a residency at Villa Romana in Florence, where he had become fascinated by the distorted, or, as he called it, 'excessive,' figures of 16th-century Mannerists including Pontormo and Parmigianino. Against the backdrop of post-war Germany, his own figures emerged as partisans, rebels, painters, shepherds and poets. 'They’re not heroes swinging their fists,' Baselitz said. 'They look broken, destroyed, ragged, tattered. And that’s how I wanted them.'

Frieze London 2026 runs from 14-18 October, frieze.com

Adriana Meunié fell in love with textiles while studying fashion design at BAU Centro Universitario de Diseño in Barcelona, Spain. 'I feel like textiles have become the language with which I can express myself better,' she says, reflecting on her ever-growing body of woven work. Her large-scale weavings and tapestries, appearing like hairy mythical creatures, are made using traditional weaving techniques and local materials sourced from her native Mallorca. Although calm and mesmerising, her works can also be slightly unsettling – possessing a tension that she describes as a kind of 'monstrous elegance'.

Born and raised in the small coastal resort of Cala Llombards, for Meunié, exploring different woven textures and volumes offered a return to something fundamental. 'It was like going back to the essential and primordial textile form,' she tells Wallpaper*.

In 2014, after years of experimentation, she came across a raw piece of wool in an old barn and was captivated by its beauty and textures. In this moment, she says, she realised the importance of provenance – understanding where materials come from, who works with them and how.

Over time, she learned how to turn this raw material into something clean yet expressive, initially creating woven pieces before she started attaching the wool – along with rope, grass and leaves – to canvases, creating tapestries that she likens to woven paintings. 'This opened a whole new portal and it allowed me to create more defined lines and shapes,' she says. 'I always say that I’m a studio person – it’s by doing that I learn and new things come out. One piece evolves from the other through a mistake... an idea while working.'

As an island, Mallorca has a proud history of craft and making that was developed out of necessity to be self-sufficient. Traditional fabrics called Teixit de Llengües are still made on looms, but the number of people with the requisite knowledge and skill is vastly reduced – Meunié says only three companies using the technique remain on the island. While there are still basketry artisans practising across Mallorca, Meunié believes the rapid growth of tourism has contributed to the loss of other techniques. 'Tourism is a very tricky business – it can erase cultural heritage if you don’t position and value it as a community,' she reflects. 'It was one of my motivations to start using the local materials of my surroundings. Twelve years ago, it wasn’t so popular here. I was so tired and sad with the image of sun and beach that Mallorca had, that I decided to concentrate my attention in the land part: sheep, vegetal materials, our fields, shepherds and farmers.'

Since she began her practice, Meunié has noticed a revival of local craft and its potential to be used to create contemporary art and design. 'Mallorca is so culturally rich: we have our language, a long tradition in craft, a way of living simply (the true Mediterranean), a millenary history. I think that globally, people are increasingly appreciating craft because it connects you better to the place where you find yourself, and in this tech era we are stepping into so quickly, I think it’s crucial for everyone to keep a connection with reality.'

Today Meunié lives and works from a renovated Mallorcan farmhouse in the south of the island surrounded by fields. Her working day is punctuated by taking care of her many animals – a coop of chickens, a donkey named Cato, Petit the goat and her dog, Tota. 'I fight for having time,' she laments. 'It’s incredible because the world is so crazy that even living in the countryside doesn’t exempt me from feeling a kind of constant stress, like if the days were too short. I really don’t like this sensation – it’s my life goal to get rid of it somehow.'

Since 2024, Meunié has been working with Sarah Myerscough Gallery, participating in the group show 'Thread' - an international survey on contemporary woven work – earlier in 2026. At PAD London 2026 (13-18 October) she will present two tapestries named 'A Wall of Wilderness', made using a combination of plant fibres from her native Mallorca, including carritx, esparto, sisal, linen, estopa and antique esparto rope. These tapestries, she explains, create a sense of movement but also play with the idea of bringing the outside in – 'like having a bit of a field inside a space', she says.

'Nature isn’t only calming, it’s also wild, violent and dangerous,' she reflects. 'That tension is something I want to keep digging into, or let’s say, what gives me satisfaction, because I don’t believe in simple or easy beauty. I think that when something is unsettling, it’s because it’s moving things in you that maybe you weren’t aware of.'

Adriana Meunié is at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, Booth B27, PAD London, 13 to 18 October 2026 at Berkeley Square

Coinciding with this year’s Frieze Art Fair and PAD London is the Mount Street Neighbourhood Arts Festival, which is back again this year. From 12 -17 October, the festival unites visual art, fashion, food and culture across Mayfair.

Last year, across the area’s prestigious addresses, including Mount Street, South Audley Street and Carlos Place, we saw a theme of art and books. For 2026, the festival leans into photography, featuring British photographer Miles Aldridge.

Aldridge is best known for his portrait series ‘15 Minutes of Fame ’, which will feature during the festival. 62 South Audley Street will be transformed into his working studio. Inspired by his 2024 TIME Icon of the Year shoot with Elton John, the interactive installation will invite visitors to sit against his orange backdrop for a 15-minute portrait. Each sitting results in a unique Polaroid.

‘I never know who will walk into my studio, but over the course of 15 minutes together, we create spontaneous, improvised portraits whose originality never ceases to amaze me’, says Miles Aldridge. ‘Everyone embraces the impromptu nature of the project, acting out an iconic version of themselves, and as with the best images from the history of photography, how they actually come into being is a mystery. Now, after taking my portable studio to Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze LA and the Venice Biennale, it is a joy to be bringing it to my home city for Frieze and PAD.’

The exhibition is accompanied by a new multidisciplinary performance, ‘The Fabric of Us’ at Grosvenor Chapel, by actor and writer Omari Douglas. Taking place on 13 October, it will feature dance, spoken word, music, painting and clothing, overall exploring the theme of creating and shedding identity.

The festival will also have an Art Pub Quiz at The Audley Public House, and Hauser & Wirth Publishers will bring their Pop-Up to 62 South Audley Street, spotlighting its latest releases alongside a selection of limited signed copies. Throughout the week, there will be numerous talks and presentations, including creative studio A Vibe Called Tech, which will host a series of breakfast conversations exploring the art of rituals, with residents including Hauser & Wirth Publishers Book Shop, Lyndsey Ingram, FoundRae and APPARATUS.

Today, Farm Shop, The Row, The Connaught, Dr. Barbara Sturm, Scott’s, Simone Rocha, The Audley Public House and Jessica McCormack are among the Mount Street partners. The festival brings together such a wide roster of creatives, combining culture and community at this celebrated address.

In 1997, Comme des Garçons released a mind- and body-bending collection. ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’ – affectionately nicknamed ‘Lumps and Bumps’ – radically reimagined the silhouette with the use of unconventional padding and protrusions. In doing so, designer Rei Kawakubo pushed back on deeply set ideals about the human form, rebelling against mainstream notions of femininity and desirability. For east London gallerist Rose Easton, the collection is a defining moment.

'Her clothes make me feel powerful,' Easton said ahead of the opening of her exhibition ‘Lumps and Bumps’ (until 12 December 2026), an homage to the spirit of Kawakubo’s radical designs. 'For want of a better word, a sort of ugliness that a particular flavour of man didn’t get, that perturbed and distanced them. That look has seeped into the contemporary mainstream now, but this was at a time, in 1997, when spray-on denim and Hervé Léger dresses were the thing.'

Easton’s exhibition brings together a selection of contemporary artists to riff on the 1997 collection. In different ways, Dogperson39, Sarah Benslimane, Sylvie Fleury, Charlotte Kingsnorth and Caitlin MacQueen delve into disturbance and protrusion, experimenting with materials that can’t easily be categorised. Fleury’s bodily sculpture seem to be squeezed and inflated, appearing seductive through its blue chrome materiality, but defying traditional anatomy. Kingsnorth’s padded, pale leather bench is fleshy and bulging, disturbing line we might typically draw between the body and the structure that houses it.

At a time of AI and other technology creating veneers and avatars to smooth out our imagined faults, when GLP-1s and body modifications are booming, Easton 'kept thinking about the dissolution of the boundary of the body, between self and other, physical and digital. And I kept returning to this collection and then inevitably, as it happens when you get a worm in the brain, you start seeing it reflected back to you in everything you do.' The collection opens up a broad spectrum of conversations surrounding the politics of the body, from access and inclusion to taste and the designed environment.

Easton has a background in fashion having previously worked with British designer Phoebe English. Dover Street Market, co-founded by Kawakubo, was the first store to buy their debut collection. Easton frequently infuses art exhibitions with fashion in an unpredictable manner. She is intrigued by how clothes, especially from ‘Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body’, can 'act as a structured interface between the body and the world. [Clothing] has the power to modify how we feel about ourselves in relation to that world, and how the world perceives us.' Likewise, she notes, 'artworks can act upon us in a similar way, heightening our awareness of our body in relation to another body or form. We understand these encounters through our own felt senses: a sculpture tells us how to move around it; a painting directs our gaze.'

The gallerist’s own bodily experience also feeds into the show. As a new mother, watching her form change and grow in ways that can at times feel alien, she felt a renewed kinship with the 1997 collection. 'You become so overtly “woman” that it’s almost perverse,' she said. 'Western society still hasn’t quite worked out what to do or how to behave around pregnant mothers… I was fascinated by the ways in which men couldn’t look at me, would avert their gaze and were somewhat horrified by this bulge, this protrusion. Although not the driving force, Rei’s collection and subsequent conversations with the artists were a way in which to navigate this experience.'

‘Lumps and Bumps’ at Rose Easton until 12 December 2026

roseeaston.com

An art deco envelope has been transformed into a minimalist London workspace, courtesy of architecture practice SODA (Studio of Design & Architecture). The scheme, titled Elsley House and located in a 1920s building on Great Titchfield Street in London's West End, was designed not only to create a functional, 21st-century office for the client, Great Portland Estates (GPE), but also to produce an interior that exudes the warmth of the 'family hearth', the architects explain.

Explore Elsley House, a new London workspace by SODA

This idea of introducing the 'hearth' as the conceptual core of the design is not arbitrary – nor simply adhering to modern trends that bring a sense of hospitality into the London workspace. The building is named after Thomas Elsley, a local metalwork fabricator from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His craftsmanship and tiles often adorn fireplaces – inspiring the building's connection to the 'hearth'.

Today's equivalent, here, becomes the office tea point, which SODA places at the centre of its design. Around it, an elegant, solid-surface kitchen and communal seating arranged around blue-stained timber tables form the space's social heart. Soft bolster cushions juxtaposed with hard-edged frames complete the composition.

This London workspace is, as a result of this approach, conceived as a contemporary, pared-down interior featuring calming colours and a natural material palette. Crittall banding is matched by bespoke furnishings and details, from storage and shelving to rugs – making working here a thoroughly tailored experience.

'Everything was centred around the notion of the hearth, a primaeval concept predating building, where people gathered for warmth and protection and where storytelling and conversation evolved. Thomas Elsley provided the historical grounding for us; his understanding of a room and the need for a focal point to draw people in. Working with GPE, we had a real opportunity to translate these ideas into a contemporary workplace and to do it in a way that is rooted in the history of this building and the wider context of the area,' says Evelyn Sung, architect at SODA.

A basement gym, complete with a yoga room wrapped in a warm Maharam curtain in orangey-peach colour, and an outdoor courtyard featuring patterned tiles, soft furnishings and lots of planting, ensure wellness is also central in this modern office project – with the art deco geometry of the building's façade echoed in the patterns across surfaces throughout.

sodastudio.co.uk

A new West London extension is a contemporary showcase of how to make the most of a boutique footprint and modest budget. Ealing Return, a new residential design by specialist experts Kitchen Bee and Brown Urbanism, a Wallpaper* Architects Directory 2024 alumnus, is situated in West Ealing. The team – Brown has award-winning work such as Triangle House under his belt – worked in harmony to craft a rear addition to an existing period property in order to expand the family home's kitchen and dining area towards the garden.

Explore a west London extension with Ealing Return

The ground floor project also included the full refurbishment of the terraced house to provide an open-plan lounge, kitchen and dining space for the users – a family of three. The new-build element replaced a pre-existing lean-to rear extension that had become unfit for purpose, allowing only space for a galley kitchen layout with poor light.

Brown and Kitchen Bee's Mioko Fujisaki recall: 'The client appointed Kitchen Bee Design Ltd to consider options for improving the kitchen layout. It became clear that a replacement ground floor extension would unlock the ground floor layout – at which point Kitchen Bee invited their collaborator architect Brown Urbanism to work with the client to consider how to arrange a new extension to provide the additional requirements.'

The aim? 'More light and openness across the ground floor; better flow from the front to the back of the house; additional utility space for a washing machine and dryer; a larger, more efficient kitchen; the addition of a ground-floor guest WC; a built-in seating area and dining room; more space to spend time with friends and family; lots of storage yet feeling spacious,' explains the team.

Kitchen manufacturer Armony Cucine took on the build.

'Our approach was to provide great light, volume and storage without sterility. We wanted to create an opportunity for a subtle and distinctive character internally,' says Brown.

'We considered around 7-8 iterative options which tested the idea of various walk-in utility rooms that would divide the ground floor plan into distinct segments - the chosen option favoured the double route approach which carefully divides the lounge and kitchen/dining spaces via two mirrored arched openings that allow light and views from the front to the back of the house, maximising the sense of volume whilst retaining a sense of enclosure to the cosier living space.'

He continues: 'Mioko and Lucy from Kitchen Bee provided all the required utility room functions within a bank of tall units within the kitchen itself. We designed the pitched side infill section with exposed painted rafters spanning below the roof lights, creating a continuous rhythm along the ceiling whilst subtly dappling the direct sunlight.'

brownurbanism.com

kitchenbeedesign.com

At the turn of the century, an ultra-violent Japanese film about a class of students forced to fight to the death launched teenage actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to national stardom. Today, he’s still known to many by his Battle Royale character’s name – Boy #15: Shuya Nanahara – and his face can be found in everything from gangster video games and billboard advertisements to heads of lettuce in Japanese supermarkets.

But his latest venture to London marks a return to dystopian storytelling of a decidedly different nature. On the weekend of 8-11 October 2026, he’ll play the lead in the first-ever stage adaptation of a surreal 1985 ‘cyberpunk’ novel by Norwegian Wood writer Haruki Murakami at the Barbican. End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland offers a tale of cyborgs, unicorns, and sewer monsters between a Kafkaesque Tokyo underworld and a strange, walled-off town.

And while a Fujiwara-introduced screening of Battle Royale also takes place at the venue the same weekend, the programming marks a nostalgic head-trip in more ways than one: this was the same stage on which the actor made his theatre debut 29 years ago, when he was just 15 years old. 'I’d never been abroad. I knew nothing of the world. I didn’t even have a passport,' he tells Wallpaper*. 'I didn’t really appreciate the scale of it, and how impressive it was to take a title role on stage at the Barbican – but that’s how my theatre life began.'

That 1997 Yukio Ninagawa stage production of Shintokumaru predated even his star turn in Japan’s notorious Y2K Lord of the Flies, but was no less impressive a feat. The revered theatre director, known for work of 'astonishing visual bravura' and for harmonising eastern and western traditions, said The Guardian in 2016, had plucked Fujiwara from auditions of over 5,000 hopeful youngsters to offer him the title role; a casting process that legendary crime film auteur Kinji Fukasaku would echo three years later in Battle Royale.

In Shintokumaru, Fujiwara would play an isolated youth grieving his dead mother while wrestling with a turbulent, confused attraction to his stepmother. For Battle Royale, Fujiwara cohabited with his young co-stars on the remote island where the film’s deadly school games were staged. 'These were two very different worlds,' the actor recalls, 'but the two great maestros [behind them] were similar, in a way. They’d really drive us as actors towards emotional extremes, and push you harder to give something extra. The difference was that one was in front of a camera, and the other was in front of an audience.'

He became a major screen star following Battle Royale’s release. (Manga adaptation Death Note – reimagined as a musical at the Barbican earlier this summer, and returning for another season in 2027 – was another Fujiwara-led screen smash in 2006.) And he would also return several times to the Barbican with Ninagawa in the years that followed – including for a production of Yukio Mishima’s Yorobashi in 2001, and to perform Shakespeare in 2015. The latter was a source of personal anxiety:

'To bring Hamlet from an Asian country to the homeland of Shakespeare was nerve-wracking,' he recalls. 'It’s like a British company creating a kabuki play and then bringing it to Japan.

'We’d heard scary stories about UK audiences ever since we were young,' he continues. 'That if it wasn’t good, people would stand up and leave in the middle of it… The director drove the cast really hard to be able to respond to such critical eyes on that production. We rehearsed and rehearsed to build our confidence.'

In time, the theatre would even reunite Fujiwara with his Battle Royale co-lead, Aki Maeda: she played his disillusioned schoolteacher’s long-suffering wife in a Japanese production of Chekhov’s Platonov in 2019.

With so much experience working with storytelling trailblazers, it might seem inevitable that an opportunity to engage with 'Japan’s greatest living novelist', as Barbican head of Theatre & Dance Toni Racklin puts it, would one day arise. But even so, Murakami’s cryptic 1985 dual-narrative novel seems a challenging choice.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, as it is titled in Murakami’s original novel, is the story of a human data processor who encrypts information within his own brain, and eventually finds himself at the centre of a mysterious conspiracy. As he tries to make sense of the chaos around him, he also develops a deep connection to an alternate, superficially peaceful world where his memories and individuality are gradually stripped away. Though complex, the 41-year-old text feels keenly relevant today, with themes of data-mining, surveillance, and fast-developing technologies arguably even more potent now than at the dawn of Tokyo’s technology-fuelled bubble-economy years when it was first published. But either way, most would surely agree, beneath Murakami’s intricate narratives are always much deeper and more profound preoccupations at play.

'He’s a wonderful writer and artist,' says Fujiwara. 'I’ve read his works since I was young, and there has always been something very heartwarming about them.' Part of that appeal is Murakami’s unique ability to conjure up liminality, longing, or nostalgia for 'things that were almost lost', he continues. And that effect is seemingly just as potent on the author himself: 'Murakami told me that he wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland… so many years ago that he had forgotten about it himself,' says Fujiwara. 'And yet he came to visit the rehearsal and the show several times.'

Produced by the same entertainment company behind Fujiwara’s Ninagawa plays – as well as the theatre director’s 2015 production of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (which did not involve Fujiwara) – the Horipro stage production End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland is directed by Philippe Decouflé, a choreographer and mime artist perhaps best known for his music videos for New Order and Fine Young Cannibals. 'To adapt Murakami for the stage must have been a huge pressure for Philippe,' says Fujiwara. 'In fact, whenever Murakami came to the rehearsal, he’d say that “God is descending on us”, and we’d all get very nervous.'

Just as with his collaborations with Ninagawa, this 2026 production has been defined by long rehearsals and hard work – with the reimagining of such a rich and complex world necessitating strict discipline among the dancers and performers, says Fujiwara. But the results have already been rapturously received in Japan and in Singapore: 'Unabashedly graceful beauty… [and] surreal magic infiltrates all parts, and the result – dare this reviewer say – trumps the novel,' said The Straits Times in April. With the story’s distinct worlds depicted in black-and-white and colour, and incorporating dance choreography, shadow work, and even treadmills, the Barbican’s Toni Racklin now hails it as a 'true spectacle' on the eve of its European premiere.

But for Fujiwara, this headline event within the Barbican’s two-month ‘Haruki Murakami season’ – comprising film screenings, jazz music performances, and even an 'in conversation' event with the author himself – also offers pause for reflection. 'The biggest factor in my own growth and development, in terms of the ways I express things as an actor, was the birth of my child ten years ago,' he says. 'And she is now nearing the age that I was when I made my debut here.' It is, perhaps, the latest cyclical motion in a career that seems to derive strength from folding back upon itself, bringing Fujiwara back to the same stages and themes, but never quite as the same actor.

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland will be performed at the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 8 – Sunday 11 Oct 2026

Aston Martin doubles down on its luxury credentials with two new announcements, one automotive and one architectural. The latter is the unveiling of Q London, a bespoke space on Mayfair’s Berkeley Square that’ll serve as both flagship showroom, destination event space, and a first point of contact for new owners and those looking to embark on their own unique commissions via Aston Martin’s Q service.

The new space is located on the east side of the historic city square, completing a run of premium brand showrooms in the area, and takes up the ground and basement of a 587 sq m unit. Inside, there’s space for up to four cars, as well as specification suites, informal and formal seating areas and a boardroom (which doubles as a private dining space). The new space follows the template set by Q New York on Park Avenue.

Q London’s opening was accompanied by the world debut of the new DBX GT, the latest variant of Aston Martin’s (rather venerable) sporting SUV. As the suffix suggests, the GT variant majors on comfort and luxury, rather than the more outright performance-focus of its sister model, the DBX S. The grace, rather than the pace, if you will.

Subtle changes to exterior styling dial down the outright aggression of the more lairy versions, while there’s then an added focus on interior craft and comfort. The latter is also given a fillip by revisions to the chassis, making the big DBX more pliable over rougher road surfaces.

The twin-turbo V8 is hardly lacking in power – it has 727PS – but with a power delivery that’s tuned to be slightly less aggressive than the DBX S. A sprint to 60mph can be achieved in 3.1 seconds and the GT will top out at 193mph. The exhaust note has been tuned to be more discreet in standard driving modes, with a more sonorous/aggravating soundtrack available in Sport and Sport+ modes.

Aston spotters will be able to distinguish the GT straight away by a new ‘double vaned’ grill, which emphasises the width of the car even more. A similar two-piece treatment is given to the side strake detail, which now incorporates one polished and one satin element. Body colour paint extends all the way to the lower sills and rear diffusers, while there are also elegant new 22-inch wheels with a satin titanium finish.

Other new trim details include monotone, duotone and tritone options, with textured finishes like quilting and perforations. New seat designs – plusher and more curvaceous – along with an ‘individual’ rear seat layout that keeps the car’s five-seater capability but emphasises three distinct places through colour, trim and form.

All this is set beneath a standard panoramic glass roof. The overall message is that this is not a carbon fibre-swathed track monster, but rather a more refined and relaxing iteration of an accomplished performance car.

Aston Martin DBX GT, price tbc, AstonMartin.com, @AstonMartin

On view at Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery until 10 November 2026, ‘Between Ruin and Root’ is the first solo exhibition of Joy Bonfield-Colombara (aka Joy BC). Comprising more than 20 pieces, the show introduces six new creations that Bonfield-Colombara created specifically for her debut with the London gallery. All sit somewhere between jewellery and sculpture. ‘My pieces oscillate between jewellery, sculpture and talisman,’ the Italian-British artist and goldsmith explains. ‘As humans, we like to categorise. But an artwork can be many things at once, a mycelium of emotion, material, and form. Whether it’s a composition, a dance, a ceramic, a film, or a painting. For me, it gets interesting when there is cross-pollination.’

Born and raised in London, Bonfield-Colombara is an alum of the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Working with master artisans in both Italy and Japan, she is trained in metal casting and rare techniques such as Japanese urushi lacquer, for which natural tree sap is applied to a variety of bases. ‘London, Glasgow, Tokyo, Kyoto, Umbria and Rome. These are the places, striations of craft and the cultures that have influenced my work the most,’ Bonfield-Colombara says when asked about her globetrotting education. ‘My practice is a love letter to materiality, storytelling and craft. Head, heart and hands working harmoniously in tandem.’

At Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery, pieces such as the 2025 ‘Precious Tear’ ring – a bust fragment in blackened silver with one gold-set old cut diamond for a tear drop – or a new recycled yellow gold torque necklace, named ‘Demeter (Parched Earth / Rain)’ after the Olympian goddess of agriculture, grain, and the harvest, draw from ancient Greece and Rome. ‘My grandfather described me as an old soul, and young at heart,’ says Bonfield-Colombara. ‘I see time as all interconnected – past, present and future – akin to the Andean Cosmovision, rather than Western linear timelines. Narratives that were explored in ancient civilisations are still completely relative now. The materials we have been drawn to continue to be seductive – especially gold, and bronze, which has been used in objects of ceremony, magic, celebration and venerating stories and beauty, across continents and epochs.’

'All of my artworks are given female names,' Renée Levi tells me. We are sitting in her Basel studio beside September, a colossal abstract painting in the vivid, often neon palette that has defined her work for decades. Blues, greens, oranges and pinks, thick with pigment, gather in loose squares and looping circles, each swept across a grid-like industrial mesh with a large mop. Around every mass of colour, Levi has built up zig-zags of silver spray paint. Read from left to right, the forms swell in scale. The surface takes on the look of a map or a geological survey, charting a body moving across it.

The choice of female names is an insistent act to ensure that women are no longer written out of art history. This painting also takes its title from the month of its unveiling on the Hayward's façade on London's South Bank, where it is residing from 23 September to 15 November 2026, marking a shift in seasons when the light changes, the weather turns and the city picks up its pace after summer.

Co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, and Levi's first large-scale commission in the UK. Seen from the Royal Festival Hall, September appears a different work from the one in the studio. By day, the colour sits on the iridescent mesh. As the afternoon fades it begins to loosen, and by dusk it has lifted from the surface entirely, hovering against the concrete as though nothing were holding it there.

To understand why Levi paints the way she does, it is helpful to know that she did not begin her career as a painter. Born in Istanbul in 1960 and raised in Aargau, Switzerland, she trained as an architect and worked with Herzog & de Meuron in Basel before studying art at the Zurich University of the Arts. Though she sees her early career informing her painting practice.

'It is a kind of continuation,' she says. 'For me, architecture isn't really separate from painting. That separation is something the art market imposes, and it's also a product of how we're taught to think in categories.' Levi thinks of her paintings as objects, and of walls and façades as structures that dictate scale, material and gesture. She has made several public interventions since early in her career, including a commission for the pediment of the Federal Palace in Bern, and her practice has been recognised with the Prix Meret Oppenheim and the Prix de la Société des Arts de Genève. The Hayward is the latest commission in a long investigation into what painting can do to a building, and what a building can do to a painting.

The Hayward is a Grade-II listed landmark, all exposed concrete, jutting forms and hard and fast geometry. Levi’s first visit to the South Bank was on a cold, rainy day, and she read the site closely, with its worn cement paving, an outdoor seating area she describes as ‘full of unrealised wishes’, awkward stairs and yellow concrete elements dating from the seventies. What emerged responds directly to the building's own composition. September takes the Hayward's distinctive protruding rectangular window, often called the ‘eye’ of the building, and makes it part of the painting, extending the work above and below it. Rather than laying an image over the façade, Levi has let the architecture set the terms.

Levi's method is, on its surface, disarmingly simple. She paints in a single continuous passage, left to right, like writing, without correction or overpainting. In her own words: 'Drawing is an immediate, bodily act in situ within a site that determines material, scale, and action… Rules arise within the act and exclude correction, overpainting, and composition.' The immediacy, though, rests on long stretches of preparation and patience. 'You have to understand that I take a lot of breaks,' she says. 'Sometimes I'll go three months without painting, and then I decide it's time to work again.'

She arrives at that moment without a picture in mind, but with everything else settled: the brush, the material, the size of the surface, the colours. 'The preparation actually takes much more time than the painting itself, precisely so that I'm not interrupted once I start.' For September, that meant buying several large mop brushes in advance, one for red, one for blue, one for green, so she would never have to stop and switch. She works with an assistant, but needs silence and concentration above all.

Because the act of painting is everything, Levi does not believe in failure in the usual sense. 'There is no “bad”,’ she says, 'because I really believe in the moment of doing.' The scale of each gesture is governed by the reach of her own body. On the Hayward's surface, no mark exceeds what a human arm can make. Up close, a colossal public painting turns out to be a record of one person moving. Painting outdoors on the Thames for two months posed practical questions for the commission too. The answer was an industrial mesh, the kind usually used for large-scale advertising, which lets air pass through the surface and withstands the weather. There is no system to the palette. 'It's mostly about what makes me happy in the moment,' she says.

What makes September unusual, even within Levi's own practice, is where it will be seen. Painting at this scale as urban public art is new territory for her, and the South Bank as a thoroughfare of commuters, tourists, skateboarders, concert-goers heading to the Royal Festival Hall. Most people will not stand before the work so much as move past it. Levi has embraced that. 'The work can never be seen all at once,' she says. 'It is encountered in passing, from different distances and viewpoints, and perhaps something different is noticed each time.' The painting, she suggests, unfolds twice: first in the act of making it, and again in the movement of the people who walk by. Hayward curator Yung Ma sees it as a disruption of the grey façade, a work that turns an ordinary riverside walk into an unexpected meeting with colour.

For eight weeks, it will slip into the routine of the people who pass it every day, glimpsed at an angle from the bridge, the river path or the top deck of a bus. September's sun sits lower than the summer sunlight, and by late afternoon it glows across the South Bank, turning the grey concrete briefly to honey and catching the mesh so the whole surface shimmers. Against that warmth the neons burn hotter, while the silver zig-zags flare and vanish as the angle changes. As the weeks run on towards November, the light will shorten and cool, the shadows of Hayward's own jutting forms will stretch further across the painting, and the colour, deprived of sun, will begin its evening float earlier each day. As the days change, no passers-by will see quite the work in quite the same way. Then it will be gone. Levi, characteristically, is most interested in that moment. ‘For a limited time, September changes the appearance of the Hayward Gallery. And when the work disappears again, those who have passed it before may notice that something is missing.’

Renée Levi's September, co-commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, is on view on the façade of the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, from 23 September to 15 November 2026

southbankcentre.co.uk

In west London, housed in a historic 1910 building, designer Rose Uniacke’s latest project unfolds. She worked closely with her client, a collector with an eye for art, who wanted to improve the apartment conversion and create a comfortable London base for him and his family.

The 3,111 sq ft space offered more than a design project, as Uniacke – who has previously shown Wallpaper* around her own London home – leaned into the building’s architectural context, encompassing bespoke joinery and lighting design. ‘While the interior is now fairly contemporary, with minimal detailing, the original architecture retains a strong presence, particularly through the bold arched windows that frame beautiful, expansive views,' Uniacke tells Wallpaper*. She sourced rare midcentury works by Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand and Jean Dunand, and paired these with contemporary elements.

Uniacke stresses that it was important for the home not to feel like a gallery. ‘I wanted the spaces to feel considered and layered. The room should always come first, with the beautiful things within it coming second. The overall feeling needed to be comfortable, welcoming and light, with a sense of ease.’

Artworks from the client's collection were chosen to anchor colour and mood, and Uniacke added furniture and objects of equal standing, inspired by the initial conversations she had with her client. ‘It led me towards collectible French furniture of the 20th century and pieces from contemporary Japan, alongside my own designs from the Rose Uniacke Editions range, and I wanted to include some pieces from antiquity. As always, the pieces led the design.’

Uniacke explains that fabrics and paints are always in response to light, objects and furniture. For this project, the palette shifts from white and pale blue-green through to soft pink and dark red. Fabrics are used on the bedroom walls, adding a sense of softness.

‘I like the way there is often a lightness to 20th-century design that worked particularly well in this apartment, alongside the large windows and open views. The Jean Prouvé bookcase in the main sitting room was an important starting point,' she notes. 'It was made in 1930 as a special commission and is an important and unique piece, complete with its original paint. It was the right scale, the perfect colour, and had an interesting feeling of airiness that felt completely at home next to the windows. It became an anchor for the room and, in many ways, the driver for everything around it.'

The rest of the room features treasures such as an Egyptian carved tablet from 332–30 BC, depicting Ptolemy III and retaining traces of its striking original paint, a ceramic Pyramide by Jacques and Dani Ruelland from 1980, and a Jean Prouvé wall light from 1950. ‘I like these kinds of echoes and conversations between pieces, particularly when they cross periods and cultures. The overall feeling is one of elegant informality and ease.’

Although the home is full of collectible pieces, it is important for the space to feel comfortable and welcoming – even if there are significant art pieces, the atmosphere doesn't feel too precious. However, in a world full of visual noise, how does one know when a room is done? For Uniacke, the answer is simple: ‘I don’t think a room is ever done, is it? It might achieve a certain balance that makes it ready to be lived in, but rooms are always going to evolve. In this case, being the home of a collector, things come into the collection and move around. Rooms change over time with the people who live in them. I’m excited by rooms that continue to evolve; it’s part of the fun.’

roseuniacke.com

‘Our archive is fundamental to the brand, but we do not see it as something static or nostalgic,’ says Robert Triefus, Stone Island’s CEO, as the cult technical-wear brand unveils its first formal collaboration with the independent collectors ‘who have helped preserve, interpret and shape the brand over [the past] four decades’.

Titled ‘Selected Works ’982–’026 Stone Island: The Collector Series’, the project will unfold at Selfridges Corner Shop, the London department store’s ephemeral ground-floor space that has previously featured pop-ups from the likes of Celine, Loewe and Prada, among others. Open for six weeks, the space will feature pieces from Stone Island’s ‘living archive’, but also host some of its most dedicated collectors: among them Maher, Better Gift Shop, ’bout, 194 Local, Louis Holsgrove, Metallic Curtain, Pezze and SimJae, who will curate their own selections as well as participate in events across the month.

‘The project is an evolution of Selected Works, through which we have previously explored the Stone Island archive in different cities and cultural contexts,’ says Triefus. ‘For Selfridges, we wanted to develop that idea further by bringing our own archive into dialogue with the independent collectors who have preserved, studied and interpreted Stone Island over many years.

‘For the first time, selected pieces from collectors’ personal archives will be available to purchase,’ he continues. ‘Their provenance and individual histories are an important part of their value. The result is not simply a retrospective or a pop-up store, but a meeting point between archive, current product, commerce and culture [as well as] between Stone Island and the community that has grown around it.’

To conceive the space, Stone Island drafted Willo Perron, Wallpaper’s Designer of the Year at the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026. The Montreal-born designer said he wanted the Corner Shop space to feel ‘intentionally temporary, modular and adaptable’ – a reflection of the idea of a ‘living archive’. Inspiration came from military and base camps that can be ‘rapidly deployed, using structures and systems that can be assembled, moved and reconfigured as needed’, as Perron explains. ‘That logic felt very connected to Stone Island, where function, utility and material experimentation have always been so present.’

He also describes the space as an ‘active build’, reflecting the changing programme of collectors who will inhabit the space. ‘The “active build” is really about allowing the environment to evolve over the course of the installation,’ he says. ‘Fixtures can move, and displays can be reconfigured as the collectors and pieces change. The temporary and modular nature of the space allows it to continually shift throughout the six weeks.’

In the Corner Shop space, which can be viewed from Oxford Street through hazy, translucent windows, moments of industrial design – like a series of metal display stands on castor wheels and modular shelving units – meet tent-like structures and digital display screens. ‘Materiality and hardware are central to the design,’ says Perron. ‘Stone Island has always been defined by its experimentation with materials, finishes and processes, so we wanted that language to carry through into the space. The way the materials, hardware and fixtures come together is really what defines the space.’

‘Willo has a very particular ability to create environments that are conceptually precise but still feel immediate and experiential,’ adds Triefus. ‘What interested us was his understanding that this should not feel like a conventional installation or retail space. [Instead it’s] a flexible system of soft structures, modular components, metal fixtures and digital elements that can be reconfigured as the collectors and garments change.’

For his part, Perron says he understands the appeal of being a Stone Island collector: growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he remembers being ‘obsessed’ with images of British raves, where Stone Island was the unofficial uniform. ‘I was always drawn to it visually, but equally to how important it was culturally. That’s really what translates into the space: recognising the people and culture around the brand, and putting that history alongside what Stone Island is doing today.’

‘Stone Island has always been shaped not only by the garments we create, but by the people who find meaning in them,’ adds Triefus. ‘Different communities have adopted the brand in different places and in very different ways, often independently of anything we could have orchestrated ourselves.

‘Their knowledge complements our formal archive and sometimes allows us to look at our own history through a different lens,’ he continues. ‘It is important that the relationship remains reciprocal and that we do not just absorb collector culture into the brand. This project gives collectors genuine authorship and a platform to present their own perspectives – fot me, that is entirely consistent with our belief in community as a form of research.’

‘Selected Works ’982–’26 Stone Island: The Collector Series’ runs until 6 November 2026 at Selfridges Corner Shop. For a full schedule of cultural programming, visit Stone Island’s website.

It's an exciting time in London when a big player makes their debut – and the Park Hyatt Residences, sales of which launch today (23 September 2026), offer such a moment. The project, housed above the Park Hyatt Hotel, which opened in 2025 within a contemporary twin-high-rise development designed by KPF, includes 103 turnkey branded residences. This was a tantalising prospect when it was first announced, but now eager buyers can get the full experience by exploring the first series of show apartments, which throw open their doors to visitors this week.

Step inside the new Park Hyatt Residences show apartments

The first family of interiors comprises two residences composed by South African designer Christian Bense. Looking to craft homes that respond both to the prospective buyers' contemporary sensibilities and the location's amazing context (the property is set right by the River Thames in Nine Elms), the creative curated an immersive domestic experience conceived to soothe and intrigue.

The interiors on offer are situated high up on Level 26, allowing long views of the London skyline, as well as close-up aerials of the neighbourhood's highlights, such as Battersea Power Station, the US Embassy and the Thames' swirling waters. The available layouts come in two different scales – a three-bedroom and a one-bedroom residence – to provide options and ignite guests' imagination.

Featured products and art include a sisal rug by Peter Page; an etching by Juan Escudero; a bespoke wool and silk rug by Amy Kent; a vintage Danish oak cabinet from The Modern Warehouse; and a bespoke sculptural triangular entry table, co-created by Bense with Atelier 278.

Bense drew on midcentury references spanning the 1950s to the 1970s to create interiors that bring together modern style and lush comfort. It was important to create pockets of cosiness and not direct all views and seating set-ups towards the outdoors – the aim was for this interior to feel like a real home that is used not just for its vistas but also for its luxurious feel and, ultimately, daily life.

He says: 'Not designing for a particular client does provide a challenge when doing a show apartment, but I feel that if you try and cater to everyone as a solution, you risk catering to no one. So it is important that you still aim to provide a unique point of view, a voice and a personality when you design. One would hope that anyone can appreciate good design when they see it, regardless of whether the style is to their taste. Ensuring that you design with a personality in mind goes a long way to ensuring the design has soul.

'In these apartments, we wanted to evoke the sense of a well-travelled client, returning home. So we combined a worldly view on antiques and all-over style, but mixed that with the comforts and familiarity of home. [There are] soft fabrics, a personalised art collection, interesting antique finds, etc. Together, this creates not only a depth of character to the design, but a personality to the home which I feel could resonate with [most people].'

A development such as this will no doubt bring a new layer to its ever-evolving Vauxhall neighbourhood. The homes are brought to market by luxury property consultancy Knightcrest, backed by London developer and placemaker Valouran.

'What makes Park Hyatt London River Thames Residences distinctive is the combination of an exceptional sense of place with the level of personalised service that defines Park Hyatt. The panoramic Thames views and Christian Bense’s beautifully considered interiors are undoubtedly part of the appeal, but what really sets the branded residences apart is the ability to pair these elements with the ease and discretion of Park Hyatt hospitality,' says Henry Barrow, sales director at Knightcrest.

He continues: 'Residents have the rare opportunity to enjoy a private home in one of London’s most dynamic new neighbourhoods, while having the services and experiences of Park Hyatt woven seamlessly into everyday life – from dedicated staff and 24-hour concierge to preferential access to the hotel’s dining and its spa, pool and fitness facilities. For us, it is this combination of a highly individual home, an extraordinary London setting and genuinely personalised hospitality that makes the proposition so special.'

Indeed, apartment residents at Park Hyatt Residences will have access to the nearby hotel's wealth of amenities – such as its swimming pool and concierge services. More amenities include a Residents' Lounge within the building, on Level 19.

Meanwhile, Bense's creative interpretation of the residences' interiors will be just the first of several planned launches and special reveals to come. The developers are planning more show apartment interiors by a curated selection of designers to be spotlighted over the next six months. Watch this space.

riverthamesresidences.com

Hong Kong food – while commonly tucked under the wider umbrella of Cantonese cuisine – has its own distinct identity, with unique local takes on dishes and drinks, from Hong Kong French toast (a peanut butter fried sandwich) to milk tea (with evaporated and/or condensed milk) and char siu (sticky-glazed roast pork).

Putting Hong Kong food on the map in London is Nicole Ma, co-founder of Hoko, a growing line of cafés. The Brick Lane original is inspired by a cha chaan teng (a traditional Hong Kong café) and feels at once retro and contemporary; the second concept, in Seven Dials, Hoko Wonton Noodles, dishes up plump and succulent hand-wrapped noodles; and now a third opening, Bakery Hoko on Bethnal Green Road, leans into the sweeter side of life.

Inside Bakery Hoko

Each Hoko location feels different, but all are marked by the intention to create a space that sits at the intersection of Hong Kong design and the context of London.

For Bakery Hoko, Ma worked with Justin Melican of Block One Design, who also designed Hoko’s Brick Lane café. Together they decided to focus on the material language of Hong Kong’s post-war public housing estates, which has been interpreted through a restrained brutalist lens.

‘Hong Kong’s post-war housing estates often had humble neighbourhood bakeries within them,’ says Ma. ‘So that relationship between everyday architecture and bakery culture felt very natural to us.’

She explains that they referenced visual codes such as repetition, grids, dense geometry, and very direct use of materials. However, ‘rather than recreating a Hong Kong bakery literally, the idea was to capture something of that architectural character and give it a contemporary London identity’.

She continues, ‘I shared lots of photographs and references I’d collected in Hong Kong, things I recognise instinctively as a Hong Konger, while Justin brought another perspective through materials and [knowledge of] brutalist architecture. We had plenty of friendly “battles” along the way, but that back-and-forth helped us find the balance between Hong Kong nostalgia and a contemporary London identity.’

One thing they both settled on was the bold mix of materials often found in Hong Kong, such as mosaic tiles, terrazzo, concrete and strong colours. In the bakery, this dynamic energy is seen, for example, in tiling and concrete working in harmony with Ketley brick counter, a nod to the Barbican.

Ma continues, ‘There are smaller, more personal details: our own photographs of Hong Kong housing estates, plastic bread trays, orange bakery tongs, and vintage blue melamine plates sourced by my mum. Those are probably the details that make the space feel most like home to me.’

The food: try a Hong Kong egg tart for a start

The baked goods look as good as the surroundings. Each gets its signature springy texture from Japanese flour. The breads are made using a sponge dough method, with controlled low-temperature fermentation. This means part of the dough is fermented separately at a lower temperature before the final mix, allowing flavour and dough structure to develop gradually.

There are both sweet and savoury goods on offer, from seaweed egg salad buns to lemon honey butter toast and bolo buns. At the heart of the bakery is Hong Kong’s most recognisable bake: the egg tart.

‘For me, the perfect egg tart is all about balance,’ says Ma. ‘The egg filling should be just cooked, soft, light and silky, almost closer to steamed egg than custard. It shouldn’t be too sweet, and you should still be able to really taste the egg. I also love a handmade crust with a slightly thicker lip. It gives you a proper crunch, and the small imperfections are part of what makes it beautiful. The pastry itself should be rich in butter and very crumbly. And most importantly, it should be eaten warm, when the filling is at its softest and the buttery aroma is at its best.’

Ma also notes not to miss the snow-crust char siu bun, filled with barbecue pork and wrapped in soft bread with a thin, crisp sweet crust on top; the Horlicks Swiss roll, with a very light, eggy sponge with malted Horlicks cream; and a strong Hong Kong milk tea.

You don’t need to be familiar with Hong Kong to enjoy the bakery. Just bring a hungry curiosity.

Bakery Hoko is located at 152-154, Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6DG

Situated beyond the Art Gallery, above the Concert Hall, and framed by the sweeping curve of Frobisher Crescent, the Barbican’s semicircular Sculpture Court was conceived as a space where art and architecture could be experienced as part of everyday life. Over the years, the one-acre courtyard periodically opened to the public for seasonal installations and events, such as outdoor cinema screenings, but in more recent times, the brutalist architecture complex's deteriorating infrastructure and limited accessibility left it largely underused.

Reviving the Barbican’s Sculpture Court

Now, as part of the wider Barbican Renewal, a long-term conservation programme ensuring the restoration of the Centre’s most iconic spaces ahead of its 50^th anniversary, the brutalist courtyard is set to be revitalised as a fully accessible public space opening in 2030.

The City of London Corporation has approved the plans, with an initial £147k grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK’s largest funder for heritage. The revival will be led by architects Allies and Morrison, working with engineers Buro Happold: proposed interventions include climate-resilient planting, improved lighting, upgraded infrastructure for events, accessible seating and paths, step-free access and clearer wayfinding. These changes will transform the Court into a welcoming space while safeguarding the heritage significance of its Grade II* listed landscape.

'The Sculpture Court is a much-loved part of the Barbican's remarkable heritage and one of London’s most distinctive Grade II* listed Brutalist landscapes,' said Stuart McLeod, Director of England, London & South at The National Lottery Heritage Fund. 'This project will not only safeguard its heritage for future generations but also establish a vibrant urban green space that will enrich the Barbican experience for visitors and the local community. We look forward to seeing the plans progress as the Barbican reimagines this important place for the next generation.'

While the Barbican is recognised globally as an architectural icon, collaboration with local communities is also central to the project. During a Co-Design Day, young people aged 16 to 25 were invited to contribute ideas for making the Sculpture Court more inclusive, exploring how the space could bring people together through culture and shared experience.

'Culture belongs to everyone, to our communities and to the next generation,' said Philippa Simpson, Chief Operating Officer at the Barbican Centre. 'These milestones represent further momentum in the Barbican Centre’s renaissance, securing the future of a cultural icon and global destination as we approach our 50th birthday, and making sure these special spaces continue to inspire people for generations to come.'

The Barbican will continue to welcome audiences while works take place, extending its programming beyond the Centre with a season of performances, exhibitions and events across London.

barbican.org.uk

On our first visit to The Horses, the final details were being attended to. In serendipitous timing, the new pub’s sign – a Renaissance-style painting of, you guessed it, horses – had been brought out, ready for installation. ‘It’s perfect. This is my first time seeing the sign,’ exclaimed Phil Winser, co-founder of Public House Group, with James Gummer and Olivier van Themsche, the trio behind London’s ‘posh pub’ favourites including The Pelican (Notting Hill), The Hart (Marylebone) and The Hero (Maida Vale). Tucked down a side street, around a ten-minute walk from Farringdon station, the new pub retains the group’s elevated take on the traditional boozer, while incorporating an elegantly casual seafood dining room upstairs that leans into the best of the British coast.

Wallpaper* dines at The Horses, London

The mood: a casually elegant ode to the sea

The interiors for The Horses were designed in-house and spearheaded by Winser himself. The team wanted to draw on the site’s history: it sits near the former Central Fish Market in Smithfield, Farringdon.

What makes The Horses so beautiful is its departure from seaside cliché, instead welcoming abstract references to the UK coastline. ‘The biggest challenge was weaving the seafood narrative into the design in a way that felt fresh and subtle, while still creating a sense of enchantment and immersion for guests,’ Winser tells Wallpaper*. ‘We spent a long time exploring familiar nautical references – light reflecting across the kitchen tiles recalls sunlight breaking on waves; delicate wool curtains reference fishing nets; and vintage motorboat ventilator covers have been cast in porcelain to create bespoke wall lights.’

The team succeeds in its restraint. Orange and yellow circular stained-glass panels divide the ground-floor dining areas, recalling washed-up sea glass. One of Winser’s favourite details is the cast-brass push plates on the doors.

‘It’s a tiny detail,’ he explains, ‘but one with a wonderful story: they are antiques salvaged from the SS Amerikanis, an old ocean liner. There’s something particularly poetic about these objects having travelled the seas and now finding a new home in a space dedicated to celebrating the produce of them.’ These details reward eagle-eyed diners – and those versed in maritime history.

The food: fresh, simple, and well executed

The dining experience shifts from floor to floor, each with its own distinct character. The pub has a warm, convivial feel, with tall panelling, upholstered ceiling panels and intimate nooks arranged around a central bar. Here, British beers are served alongside classic bar snacks, including pork pies and a scallop and bacon bap. The first floor is home to a classic oyster bar, with a large sharing table and counter seating overlooking the fish display, framed by timber cabinets.

Up another level sits the main dining room. A long, snaking banquette traces the room’s curve, while bar seating on the right follows its contours like a wave. Winser notes that the open kitchen is the focal point: ‘Low-level lighting creates a moody, theatrical atmosphere, and the bespoke wine fridges sit alongside diners, reinforcing the sense of being right at the heart of the action.’ Finally, beneath the eaves, the top floor has been designed to feel private, with a log burner and layers of soft upholstery creating a more intimate setting.

From the grill, order the Dover sole or monkfish, both well suited to the peppercorn sauce and herby garlic butter. Add a fresh salad, zingy tomatoes and, naturally, extra chips. We were advised to try the restaurant’s ‘lighter’ take on sticky toffee pudding. There was no need for a second look at the menu: a sumptuous caramel tart arrived with hints of almond and pear, alongside boozy Chantilly cream.

The Horses has an air of nostalgia, the sort of place where a smartphone feels out of place. It comes through in the setting, but also in the attentive service, which gives the experience its easy rhythm.

The Horses is located at 26-28 Ray Street London, EC1R 3DJ, United Kingdom

Henri Matisse made The Snail in Nice in 1953, the year before he died, from his bed. Unable by then to stand at a canvas, he had assistants paint sheets of paper in gouache, cut or tore shapes from them himself, and directed where each piece should be pinned to the wall, repositioning them until he was satisfied and only then having them pasted down. The finished work is close to three metres square, its shapes arranged in a loose spiral that evokes the ‘unrolling’ he had noticed while drawing a snail.

When the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake design team stood in front of it at Tate Modern last year, its size surprised them. ‘There is a vibrancy to it, as if all the pieces are still moving,’ they tell Wallpaper* now (the brand runs without a formal head designer). ’They are so dynamic, so light, as if they are ready to break out from the frame.’ The idea for the second edition of Open Studio emerged: at this scale, why not turn each cut-out into a garment?

Open Studio began in 2025, when Homme Plissé stepped off the Paris show calendar to present in places the brand had never been, opening its way of working to view as an artist opens a studio. The first edition, at Villa Medicea della Petraia during Pitti Uomo, paired a show with an exhibition of the pleating tests and colour studies behind it. Around the time the design team were considering where Open Studio should go next, Tate got in touch. The museum has a history of working with designers on collections drawn from works it holds, and an edition built around a single artwork, which the brand had never attempted, suited a format concerned with opening up a way of making; from the permanent collection they chose The Snail.

When asked what values of founder Issey Miyake they brought into the project, the design team spoke of creative freedom: ‘He always told us to trust and follow our own curiosity,’ they say. Matisse described the cut-outs as drawing straight into the colour. ‘If you're an artist, you can cut whatever you want, in whatever way you want,’ they point out. To meet the challenge of representing a flat painting with garments, they began by tracing The Snail; they had never worked with a painting this way, and had fun doing so, finding it most rewarding how literally each cut-out came to life on a body: ‘We're not just talking the talk, the painting is literally moving. We’re really animating the painting itself.’

That fluidity extended to Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck, with whom the design team shared their research process (including the documents Tate had supplied on Matisse’s final years) so that the set and clothing formed in lockstep, symbiotically, each informing the other as it developed. ‘Set design is never an afterthought,’ they maintain. Vanderbroeck, whose background is in theatre, built the tank in layers – both literal and philosophical – understanding that the room would be a different one by the end of the evening. ‘It cannot exist without the dancers and the dancers cannot exist without the set.’

The floor of the south tank was covered in white felt, cut into flat shapes and laid flush, with the garments beneath it. Dancers from Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company lifted the shapes away one at a time between sessions of One One One, Ioannis Mandafounis's improvised form in which a dancer continues for as long as a single spectator maintains eye contact; by the end they had uncovered the whole of The Snail at the centre of the room, every one of Matisse's shapes made up of a pleated garment laid flat, before changing into the capsule to finish.

In Matisse’s studio, the shapes had been pinned where he pointed, and moved when he changed his mind; the finished work keeps something of that provisional state in its torn edges and overlapping corners, the movement an echo of pieces that once moved. Circulating again as garments, on bodies, across a floor, the cut-outs had for one evening a freedom they lost when they were pasted down, ‘It’s starting flat, it’s being worn, and then it’s being left behind,’ Vanderbroeck says.

Homme Plissé has worked with an artist’s hand before Open Studio existed: its A/W 2024 collection, shown on the Paris runway, was made with Ronan Bouroullec, whose felt-tip drawings were printed across the clothes, with printed garments hung along the walls of Palais de Tokyo as the backdrop. The house called it a creative session. Where Bouroullec’s drawings were applied to the garments, the garments at Tate Modern were themselves assembled into the artwork, so that laid flat on the floor of the tank they were the collage, and worn they were the collage in motion.

The capsule, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate, runs to a printed cardigan, tunic and T-shirt seeing the composition’s blocks of orange, lilac, cobalt and green on white pleated jersey; a long-sleeved top in the collage’s palette; a crossbody bag; and a diamond-shaped scarf. Between the first visit and the floor of the tank, the idea itself barely changed, and that, more than anything made along the way, is what the design team find innovative. ‘That pure idea was carried from the drawing board to the final realisation,’ they say. ‘To us, that is something new.’

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake for Tate is available from 17 September 2026 at Tate Shops and shop.tate.org.uk for a limited time, then from January 2027 at Issey Miyake stores in Tokyo, Osaka and London.

British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir has promised a renaissance of London Fashion Week under her leadership, wanting the city to become ‘the world’s laboratory for innovation and creative exchange’, as she told WWD earlier this year when outlining her vision for the institution. ‘If Paris is luxury and Milan is heritage, then London is creativity and innovation. It always has been. But it’s about telling that story in a more exciting way,’ she said.

Now overseeing her third edition of London Fashion Week, which begins today (17 September 2026), Weir has secured two major coups: the return of McQueen, which will show its latest collection under creative director Seán McGirr on Sunday 20 September (previously the brand has shown in Paris), and Mulberry’s first runway show since 2017, which will also mark the debut of lauded (and much beloved) Scottish designer Christopher Kane as creative director of the British heritage brand.

Though the rest of the S/S 2027 schedule feels equally upbeat: few designers have fallen away this season, while elsewhere a balance has been struck between the established (Burberry, Simone Rocha, Roksanda, Erdem and the like) and the emerging (Aaron Esh, Talia Byre, A Letter and Chopova Lowena will all show across the five-day schedule). In total, there will be 47 catwalk shows and 23 presentations, run under the banner of ‘a celebration of London fashion’.

‘This season marks an exciting moment for London Fashion Week, with the return of leading British brands alongside an exceptional new generation of creative talent,’ says Weir. ‘The schedule reflects the confidence and momentum of British fashion today, bringing together established houses, emerging designers and industry partners on a platform that continues to shape global fashion. Together, they reaffirm London's position as the global home of creativity and a catalyst for innovation, opportunity and growth.’

Read on for Wallpaper’s moments to look out for at London Fashion Week S/S 2027 (17–21 September 2026).

McQueen is back

Lee Alexander McQueen held some of his most memorable shows in London – ‘Highland Rape’ (A/W 1995) took place at the Natural History Museum, ‘Dante’ at Christ Church in Spitalfields (A/W 1996), and ‘Untitled/Golden Shower’ at a former bus depot close to Victoria station – though it would be Paris where the designer would end up presenting the majority of his collections. It has been a coup, then, for British Fashion Council CEO Laura Weir to lure the British label, which is currently led by Irish creative director Seán McGirr, back to London Fashion Week (whether this is a permanent move remains to be seen). McGirr will show his S/S 2027 collection on Sunday evening (20 September 2026) at the historic Lincoln’s Inn, one of the four barristers’ Inns in central London.

Christopher Kane will debut at Mulberry

There was a collective outpouring of disappointment from the British fashion industry when Scottish designer Christopher Kane announced the closure of his eponymous London-based label in June 2023 – his runway shows, which ran as part of the city’s fashion week schedule since it was launched in 2006 with his sister Tammy, were both critically lauded and beloved among fashion insiders. This season, though, Kane will make his much-anticipated fashion return at the helm of British heritage brand Mulberry, which itself hasn’t held a physical runway show since 2017. So far, there is little hint of what to expect from the show: an intriguing Instagram teaser sees a mulberry squashed on a wooden plank. It will take place on Sunday 20 September at 3pm.

Fashion East has a new line-up

Lulu Kennedy’s Truman Brewery-based talent incubator, Fashion East, has helped launch the careers of some of the industry’s biggest names: among them Jonathan Anderson, Kim Jones, Grace Wales Bonner, Martine Rose and Craig Green. Each season, Kennedy chooses three designers to show on the runway, with each typically presenting with Fashion East for three seasons. For S/S 2027 – which will take place once again at Manor Place, a space created in collaboration between Palace (Wallpaper* October issue guest editors) and Nike – the line-up includes Jacek Gleba, who is now in his third season, Traiceline Pratt’s Goyagoma, which debuted last season, and new arrival Mé Mé by designer Mé Mé Yin, a graduate of Central Saint Martins with experience at Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela. As ever, expect bold and singular collections from the trio of designers, who will take to the runway on Friday 18 September.

Indian label Lovebirds will make its debut

This past March, Wallpaper’s Dal Chodha travelled to Geoffrey Bawa’s home in Sri Lanka to see the latest resort collection from Indian label Lovebirds, which is helmed by Amrita Khanna and Gursi Singh (based in New Delhi, it has five stores across the country). ‘The collection – full of geometric patterns, dresses with rippled folds, shoulders cut away, floral patchwork and batik prints – had all the aesthetic attitude for which the brand is loved,’ said Chodha at the time. For S/S 2027, the brand is making its London debut, showing on the morning of Monday 21 September 2026 – the same slot that fellow Indian label Raw Mango showed last season, in their own debut at London Fashion Week. ‘People have opened up to see what’s coming from South Asia and there are more voices internationally too,’ says Singh.

Watch out for A Letter

Showing on the afternoon of 18 September at the Rose Easton Gallery, A Letter is one of the more intriguing young designers on the fashion week schedule this season. Previously known as Aletta, its designers Matt Empringham and Freddy Coomes bring plenty of pedigree: Empringham worked at Loewe under Jonathan Anderson, while Coomes also worked under Anderson, though at the Irish designer’s eponymous label, JW Anderson. Their work so far has mined a similar embrace of the surreal to that of their mentor: last season, at London’s White Cube Gallery, they presented a series of looks constructed from the paper used to make faux flowers. This season marks their first official runway show.

Burberry will celebrate the trench at the V&A

As well as showing Daniel Lee’s latest collection on Monday 21 September at an as-yet-undisclosed location, Burberry is also using fashion week to open its new exhibition at London’s V&A Museum. Titled ‘The Burberry Trench: Crafting an Icon’ (opening 21 September; free to the public), the concise exhibition offers a history of the British heritage brand’s most enduring export – from its roots on the battlefield to iterations under the house’s various creative directors, including Christopher Bailey, Riccardo Tisci and Daniel Lee. ‘The Burberry trench is a global design icon rooted in British craftsmanship and a symbol of innovation, creativity and timeless style,’ says Carly Eck, brand curator, Burberry. ‘In this special display, a myriad of objects from the brand’s archive will be publicly exhibited for the first time – from early 20th-century catalogues to a Burberry trench coat worn by fashion designer Hardy Amies. We are thrilled to partner with the V&A as a highlight of our global celebrations marking 170 years of the house.’

Glenn Spiro has impeccable taste, with an eponymous jewellery brand – at the intersection of art, jewellery and design – celebrating unique avant-garde silhouettes and unexpected materials. It is no surprise, then, that the London boutique is a haven of eclectic style, uniting antiques with bespoke pieces and curating an intimate, welcoming atmosphere.

Glenn and son Joe Spiro worked on the space, at 26 Bruton Street in Mayfair, with Venezuelan designer Valerie Name Bolaño, who takes Wallpaper* behind the design…

Wallpaper*: Where did you begin in translating the richness of Glenn Spiro jewels into a new atelier?

Valerie Name Bolaño: I began by researching the building and understanding its history and context. It was once the atelier of Sir Norman Hartnell, where Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret would have their gowns custom-made. Looking through archival imagery of how the space was used, and seeing the gestures within the original interiors, made me want to preserve some of that essence, but reinterpret it in a contemporary way that would represent the language of the house.

Glenn and Joe's pieces have this extraordinary richness and intricacy. They have an incredible talent for finding rare antique stones and unusual elements and transforming them into these intimate objects. I didn't want the space to compete with that, or to feel like a conventional jewellery boutique of course. Timelessness was essential.

Instead, the idea was to create an intimate salon, somewhere you could have tea and a conversation. The materials and objects are layered and collected. We designed some pieces specifically for the space, but we also sourced antiques and objects of curiosity so that it didn't feel as though everything had arrived at once.

Much like the jewellery, there is a sense of discovery. You don't necessarily see everything immediately. There is preciousness, but also intimacy and a certain slowness to how the space reveals itself.

W*: There is a wealth of materials and textiles here. What especially were you drawn to incorporating?

VNB: I was very drawn to materials with depth, things that become more interesting and beautiful the closer you get to them.

The materials needed to have richness, but they also needed to remain quiet enough to allow the jewellery to speak. We used heavy weaves, cast glass, antiqued metals, stone and beautiful woods – materials with texture and irregularity that absorb and reflect light in different ways.

We also created what we call the Green Room, with a vision of quite literally walking into a Glenn Spiro Jewel box. So we translated that very recognisable object into an entire room: dark, intimate and enveloping, with only a few carefully placed spotlights illuminating what matters.

It houses a special display of new pieces and gives clients somewhere private to try on the jewellery, sit down and have a conversation with the designers. I love that something as small and personal as the jewellery box became the starting point for an entire spatial experience.

W*: What aesthetic and atmosphere was it key for you to cultivate? What are you proudest of here?

VNB: I wanted it to feel residential, intimate, sensual and slightly unexpected, more like a conceptual living room, surrounded by layers of memories and objects collected over many years.

Nothing is there simply to announce itself. You discover the materials, the objects and eventually the jewellery in layers. Much of the atelier follows a monochromatic palette of creams, which we felt would create a beautiful, quiet canvas for Glenn and Joe's creations. Against it, individual objects and materials are allowed to speak.

What I am proudest of is perhaps that balance. The space has a very distinct identity of its own, but ultimately it knows when to disappear and allow the jewels to become the protagonist.

There are also much more subtle connections between their world and mine throughout the atelier. I often begin projects by having conversations with clients about the symbols, objects or memories that carry meaning for them, and then finding ways of translating those into architectural or decorative details.

For example, [my studio’s] signature ceramic buttons were reimagined here using a motif taken from the materials of the Old World Collection. We cast it in bronze and incorporated it into pieces of furniture almost as though the furniture itself were wearing jewellery.

I loved that exchange of scale: taking their language of jewellery and allowing it to become part of the furniture and the room. It became a way of quietly weaving Glenn Spiro's world into mine.

Glenn Spiro's boutique at 26 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QL

glennspiro.com

Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei is set to have her largest UK exhibition to date at the Hayward Gallery in London. Slated to open in spring 2027, the exhibition will encompass many of Cao’s influential works, including The Birth (2026), Whose Utopia (2006), RMB City (2007–2011) and Asia One (2018).

Guangzhou-born Cao’s immersive works are found at the intersection of the real and the virtual. She is driven by a fascination with a surreal dystopia that takes the form of vast, all-encompassing worlds, from a dizzying expanse of hyperspace (Nova, 2019) to a robot vacuum cleaner, meandering through piles of rubble (Rumba II: Nomad, 2015).

‘At my 2027 Hayward solo exhibition, from the workers dreaming on the world's factory floors, to the avatars drifting through the virtual city, and on to lives today reorganised by algorithms, robotics and logistical infrastructure – I hope that visitors, stepping into the galleries, might think, from the vantage of the past's future or the future's past, about the future we were once promised: what kind of dream was it, after all,’ Cao says.

Cao, who created a limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s November 2021 issue, will bring this multimedia approach to her exhibition at the Hayward, divided into five parts. Viewers will begin with the first showing in the UK of The Birth (2026), Cao’s video installation that explores the role of drones in farming across China and Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, part of the gallery will become a factory dormitory, in Whose Utopia (2006), while early projects such as RMB City (2007-2011) follow Cao as she builds a virtual town on the Second Life platform.

‘It’s in the Hayward Gallery’s DNA to collaborate and introduce groundbreaking artists to our audiences,’ adds senior curator Yung Ma. ‘What makes it particularly exciting this time is the possibility of tapping into Cao Fei’s world-building ethos, turning her unique vision into a series of interconnected environments in our iconic spaces. This collaboration is also meaningful on a personal level, as a continuation of our friendship and conversation that has lasted for more than a decade.’

southbankcentre.co.uk

‘Rather than trying to avoid situations in which something difficult might happen, I became interested in what happens immediately afterwards: how do I respond to what has already happened?’ asks Korean artist Sujin Lee. ‘That was something I kept thinking about while making these paintings. I haven’t found a solution. For now, I’m simply learning to endure it.’

It is the silence that lingers after an event has passed that forms the cornerstone of Lee’s current exhibition at London’s Saatchi Yates, ‘Where We Once Stood’. In a series of 15 new paintings, Lee considers this quietness, a feeling that takes the shape of a single girl frozen in uncertainty.

‘Whenever I grow and look more closely at myself, my girls seem to grow with me,’ says Lee. ‘They also change as I observe the people around me – what they feel, how they grow, or sometimes how they remain unable to grow. I’m not sure I can really say that they have “grown up”. There is still a great deal of confusion in them. I often think about the girl, or boy, from childhood that exists within all of us, and whether we ever truly let that child go, or whether some part of them always remains.’

For Lee, who was born in Jeju Island, South Korea, and is now based in Seoul, childhood plays a crucial part in shaping identity. ‘I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, so there was never really a moment when I thought, “I’m interested in art, so I’m going to start drawing,”’ she says. ‘From a very young age, I think I simply had this vague sense that I would be drawing for the rest of my life.’

The solitary practice of the act lends itself well to Lee’s introspective nature. She has learnt to look into herself for answers, she says, in an attempt not to be led by others. The natural consequences of this grounding, and a reluctance to be affected by others, are that the figures in her paintings are often alone. Caught in nature, in snowstorms or picturesque landscapes, the girls themselves are a still fixed point, their expressions empty, unreadable.

‘I look at the feelings that remain inside me even when I no longer know exactly why they are there. Feelings that have already passed, no matter how intense they once were, have passed. But the things that remain inside me can stay for a very long time,’ she says. ‘I know that if I simply leave them untouched, they can overwhelm me. So I keep painting in order to face them rather than allow that to happen. At first, confronting them was extremely painful. Now, I’m quite a bit better at it. Maybe that means I’ve grown a little.’

Sujin Lee at Saatchi Yates until 12 November 2026

saatchiyates.com

Bloomsbury is one of London’s most studious neighbourhoods, with a rich history as the home of writers and thinkers. Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster belonged to the influential Bloomsbury Group, while Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Bob Marley all lived in the area at various points.

Russell Square feels like the perfect autumn day all year round. From the historic architecture of Gower Street to the secluded garden squares that offer an escape from the noise of London, its bookish atmosphere brings comfort to the city’s more introverted residents. The latest arrival in the neighbourhood is The Imperial Bloomsbury, a contemporary hotel set just behind Russell Square’s main thoroughfare.

Wallpaper* checks in at The Imperial Bloomsbury, London

What’s on your doorstep?

From the hotel, I recommend strolling to the British Museum. En route, stop at Momo’s Garden Café, a charming coffee stand in Gordon Square serving delicious cakes – its banana bread is particularly good – and a flat white that is actually a flat white. Turn onto Gower Street, admire the Gothic architecture and gargoyles perched above, then continue to Store Street, where you’ll find Treadwell’s, an atmospheric bookshop specialising in magic and witchcraft, before arriving at the museum. For an escape from the tourists, head behind the hotel to Fortitude Bakehouse, an excellent bakery tucked into the mews. From there, follow Marchmont Street past its cafés, restaurants and pubs towards the British Library and King’s Cross station.

Who’s behind the design?

The hotel first opened in 1905, in a building designed by Charles Fitzroy Doll. Architects at Cube Design retained its striking concrete façade while restoring many of its original features. The 357-room hotel now has reimagined interiors by Trevillion Interiors and Keane Brands, conceived as a tribute to the area’s creative spirit.

The building’s Edwardian character is balanced with modernist elements. As the designers at Keane tell Wallpaper*: ‘We avoided recreating a period interior. Instead, we treated the building’s history as a series of layers: its original Edwardian, neo-Gothic character and its later bold modernist architecture.’

They continue: ‘The existing concrete and geometric forms became a “Brutalist canvas”, softened with midcentury furniture, warm textures, seasonal colour and carefully integrated lighting. History therefore informed the design without dictating it. Architectural geometry is echoed subtly in patterns and detailing, while curated artwork and references to Bloomsbury bring a strong sense of place. The result is a contemporary space that respects the building’s past while giving it a fresh identity.’

The room to book

Although every room feels warm and inviting, The Hideaway is the one to book. Its small outdoor terrace features seating and a ‘hidden’ bathtub tucked beneath a pavilion – a playful take on the conventional hotel room. Keane explains that the team sought to soften the building’s concrete character through contrast, introducing natural timber, upholstery and textured fabrics.

‘Curved furniture and organic forms counterbalance the façade’s strong geometry, while planting and layered, golden lighting bring warmth and softness throughout,’ the designers say. ‘The concrete remains an important part of the building’s identity, but these richer, more human materials make the space feel welcoming rather than austere.’

Staying for drinks and dinner?

On the tenth floor, guests will find Arcus, a bar perched high above Bloomsbury. Hotel restaurants can sometimes feel barren, turning dinner into a transactional experience. Arcus is far from that. On our visit, the room was vibrant and busy, set against the London skyline with the BT Tower glowing in the distance. It is difficult for the panoramic view not to become part of the experience. The cocktail list is indulgent, combining original creations with familiar classics. The food menu is light, leaning towards snacks rather than full meals, which suits the setting. Both the steak and the lamb tacos were delicious.

Where to switch off

The gym is generously sized and even has an outdoor terrace where guests can cool down after a session. Fully equipped with Technogym machines, free weights and kettlebells, it is well suited to light resistance training, kettlebell workouts and bodyweight exercises. It is considerably larger than the average hotel gym, although you should not expect to be squatting any PBs.

The Bell Room and Terrace offers another place to unwind over board games, all-day grazing or an intimate conversation. Its name comes from the five bells on the adjoining terrace, which have been a feature of the hotel since it opened. Access is reserved for guests staying in the premium room categories: City, Horizon, Hideaway, Nest and Beacon.

The verdict

The Imperial feels like an escape within the city, which celebrates its context’s rich history while also feeling fresh and relevant.

The Imperial is located at 61, 66 Russell Sq, London WC1B 5BB, United Kingdom

The 2026 London Open House Festival is upon us, with over 600 venues opening their doors to visitors from 12-20 September in one of the capital's biggest architectural celebrations. After the event's closing day (it used to last a weekend, then slowly grew to an entire week due to popular demand), things go quiet for a year, until the cycle restarts. And between festivals, not much happens, right? Wrong.

2026 London Open House and its lasting impact

We spoke to Manijeh Verghese, CEO of Open City, the charity that oversees the London Open House happenings – and everything that takes place behind the scenes in the run-up and after. She tells us that, while, of course, the public-facing, now-eight-day festival has a tremendous impact in terms of promoting architecture in the capital and raising awareness by connecting everyone with buildings they might not otherwise have been able to access, there are indeed many more ways the Open House initiative pays off.

'We strongly believe that the Open House Festival changes people’s relationship with specific places and neighbourhoods as well as with other Londoners,' Verghese says. 'In our surveys of visitors, contributors and volunteers after the festival, we often see people reflect on how the festival makes them feel a greater sense of belonging, or more connected to their local area as well as the city as a whole. We enjoy seeing how visitors become volunteers or even contributors over time, and therefore start to influence the many ways in which we can open up and share our city for collective enjoyment. Seventy per cent of visitors to the 2025 festival said that they were accessing all the spaces that they visited for the first time.'

The lasting, less-expected benefits of Open House London

Looking beyond the festival dates, there are lots of anecdotal stories about young people becoming inspired to enter the architecture profession, or members of the public who experience a space that they otherwise wouldn't have, which changes their world view. The idea of togetherness and learning about each other is arguably a great incentive to take part, too. Yet it is not just the visitors who get to feel a positive impact. Participating venues also have a strong benefit, Verghese explains.

'The Festival is a great way for contributors to experiment and pilot how to open up their spaces in new ways to new audiences. For example, this year, the Zaha Hadid Foundation is opening its archive in the old Design Museum building in Shad Thames to the public for the very first time,' she says. 'Similarly, the festival team engages diverse audiences to uphold our values to prioritise access and inclusion for all. Last year, the festival team asked our two young assistant curators – as alumni from the Open City Accelerate programme for 16-18-year-olds from underrepresented backgrounds – to assist us in visiting an important civic building to look at their festival offer in advance and to sense-check how it might be perceived by young people. We offer training focused on inclusion to all contributors to ensure they have the resources and skills to welcome visitors with different needs.'

Festival director Celia Mead also highlights that taking part is a way for organisations to actively demonstrate their civic conscience. The annual survey of the London Open House Festival has shown that among the participants' 'objectives for taking part', the aims of raising awareness, reaching new audiences, and discussing specific issues in architecture or the environment all ranked quite highly, at 63 per cent, 66 per cent and 21 per cent, respectively.

It pays to stick with it too, Verghese says. Long-standing participating venues at Open House London have learned about their own operations over the years at the festival. Feedback from contributors in surveys has helped venues figure out the best way to provide volunteer support, queue management, tours and how best to ensure comfort for visitors and users. Often, the festival becomes an incentive or testing ground for different types of programming within venues, too.

There are lots of stories of participants who feel passionate about the festival, and to unexpected results. 'A favourite story is that of Fabian Watkinson, a musician who has been opening his home in Highgate New Town since 2001,' continues Verghese. 'He thought he would do it for a few years and then everyone would have seen it, but it continues to be extremely popular each year, with his tours getting fully booked in a matter of minutes! Over the years, he has also become an expert on modernist social housing through his tours for Open House visitors and social tenants who are placed in the estate, to give them a sense of pride in their area.'

While you might not think the London Open House Festival is linked to planning decisions or policy changes, there are surprising and impactful benefits for the public in this realm too. Several multi-year partnerships with different London Boroughs through their involvement in the festival were aligned to help them deliver on their cultural strategies.

Verghese highlights: 'Haringey is a great example of a borough where we are not only working with them on the festival but also with a cohort as part of our tour guide training programme, The Golden Key Academy. They have created fully funded places for local people, often community leaders, to train as tour guides and tell new stories about the area. Called the Rebel Guides, they will launch their tours during this year’s festival and will then continue to deliver them next year when Haringey is the London Borough of Culture.'

So, what's in store at the 2026 London Open House Festival?

This year, the festival returns for its 35th edition with quite a few bangers for your to-visit list. The programme contains somewhere between 600 and 700 listings for venues far and wide across the capital. From a sneak peek into the rarely open Zaha Hadid Foundation archive (our October 2026 issue story took the deep dive) to celebrating 40 years since the launch of Richard Rogers Partnership's (and we do not take this word lightly) iconic high-tech architecture at Lloyd's of London in the City, several lesser-known gems and rarely open hits have joined the list of options.

You can tour 10 Downing Street and explore the Barbican Conservatory before it is updated by Harris Bugg Studio; and of course there is a wealth of private homes, innovative and everyday, but all exceptionally designed and worth a browse – whether you are seeking home-improvement inspiration or are simply archi-curious.

'What is great about the festival is that the monumental and civic sit alongside the social, domestic and everyday – reflecting the complex mix of spaces that make up cities. Visitors choose to navigate the programme in a variety of ways, whether that’s through our themed collections, their own unique interests, their immediate neighbourhood, a planned set of visits based on bookings, or [simply] what they can encounter that is available for drop-ins,' says Verghese.

'While the iconic spaces like Lloyds or Downing Street attract large numbers of visitors who want the chance to see inside, popular spaces include private homes, faith and community spaces, as well as open studios for practices where you get a chance to see inside [creatives'] processes and ways of working. New models of social or affordable housing or new ways of living and working together are increasing in popularity, with the festival an ideal way to share these innovative alternatives with a wide audience.'

Manijeh Verghese’s highlights for 2026

Manijeh Verghese picked three favourites from this year's programme. In her words...

Wapping Hydraulic Power Station

'Wapping Hydraulic Power Station is new to the programme this year and provides a rare opportunity to visit London’s last hydraulic power station to be decommissioned. Built in 1890, it has been closed for the last ten years but is now entering a new era under the custodianship of the Glass Castle Foundation, which is transforming it into a centre for experimental arts.'

Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores

'Punchdrunk Enrichment Stores is a unique and immersive theatre space in Wembley that works with families, schools and communities. Tours of the space will showcase the different objects that fill its shelves and discuss how these have been developed with young people in Brent. Unfortunately, this is now fully booked, but you can check out an incredible range of drop-ins in our No Booking Needed collection.'

Humanise Spotters Guide

'As a way to better understand and experience what makes a building interesting, characterful and joyful, the Humanise campaign has created a downloadable, mobile-friendly spotters' guide to invite the public to look more closely and ask questions of our built environment. To test this out, visitors are invited to explore King's Cross, starting at Heatherwick Studio’s Making House and taking in 11 other buildings en route.'

5 Wallpaper* highlights to book for 2026 Open House London

It's nearly impossible to narrow down a nearly 700-item list to just five – if nothing else, because we want to be everywhere and see everything. However, if we really had to, these are five events that feel special within the 2026 Open House London festival programme.

The Lloyd’s Building

Initially criticised for its unusual look, the 14-storey building, designed as the home of insurers Lloyd’s of London, is now a beloved landmark. The project was built as three towers, each with its own service section. They surround a central 60m-high atrium flooded with natural light. The building, in the heart of the City of London is now Grade I listed, described by Historic England as ‘one of the key buildings of the modern epoch’.

Zaha Hadid Foundation

The Zaha Hadid Foundation is entering a bold new era, driven by a visionary director, Aric Chen, who is intent on protecting, preserving and promoting the late, great architect’s legacy. The great architect's archive is housed in the old Design Museum building in Shad Thames and will be open for tours in a rare opportunity to explore the architectural legacy – and personality – of Zaha Hadid.

Barbican Conservatory

In 2025, the Barbican Centre shared proposals for its extensive upcoming renewal project. The project addresses the deteriorating structures – built between 1965 and 1982 – and the brutalist architecture's contemporary issues of accessibility and sustainability. It also looks at public spaces such as the foyers and lakeside terrace, and – excitingly – its eco-brutalist conservatory. London-based Harris Bugg Studio is working on the refresh.

A design tour of Olympia

After five years of construction, the Victorian landmark, West London's Olympia, reimagined as a vibrant cultural hub by Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC, is nearly complete. With this tour, you can take a design-led look inside.

The Cloud House

Many private homes are part of the 2026 London Open House programme, and style-wise, there's definitely something for everyone in its listings. If we had to pick one, it might have to be this fluffy-feeling pink home in north London, a new design by architect Peter Morris. The project consists of two semi-detached homes in leafy Hampstead Heath, and it certainly brings a smile to our faces.

The 2026 London Open House Festival runs 12-20 September 2026, book your visit at openhouse.org.uk

American artist Tschabalala Self was keen to bring a modern, urban ‘everywoman’ to tower over the crowds at Trafalgar Square. Her commission for London’s Fourth Plinth, Lady in Blue, is a joyful and proud young woman cast in bronze, the blue of her dress and jewellery inspired by the vibrant tone of lapis lazuli.

Self, who works across mediums including painting, sewing, collage, quiltmaking and printing, imbues her figurative works with a vibrant energy. It is a vitality she translates into her Fourth Plinth commission, the 16th since the programme began, creating work she hopes will be relatable.

‘She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figure to commemorate,’ Self says. ‘She is an everyday person much like the many who occupy the square daily. She is striding forward into our collective future with ambition, purpose and optimism.’

New York born and based Self, who was announced as the winning commission in March 2024 by the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, chaired by Wallpaper* contributing editor Ekow Eshun, has always been inspired by London, she adds. ‘London is to thank for many milestones in my life. My first institutional show was held here in London, along with my first major gallery exhibition. I have come to know London as a truly global metropolis, and Lady in Blue reflects the sophistication of this city.’

Lady in Blue brings a significance to the everyday, adds Eshun. ‘Tschabalala Self takes the familiar figure of a woman moving through the city and gives her an extraordinary presence at the heart of London. This powerful sculpture will invite conversation about contemporary art, giving audiences a chance to engage with the work of a remarkable and inspirational artist.’

Lady in Blue will be a highlight of London Sculpture Week (19-27 September 2026)

For most people, a retrospective of their life’s work is the ultimate occasion to celebrate themselves, but for Charlotte Mensah, her new exhibition, ‘Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters’, is, as its title suggests, as much about the people who helped her become a pioneering force in Afro, mixed, and curly hair culture as it is about how she got there.

Open in London’s Ladbroke Hall 8-13 September 2026, ‘Community Matters’ is a mixed-media exhibition that traces Mensah’s life and career, from her childhood in Ghana to the opening of her famous salon, Hairlounge, on Portobello Road, and her position as one of Britain’s most influential hairstylists. In doing so, it showcases the people who inspired Mensah along the way and highlights the larger conversations around culture, creativity, and belonging that have always informed Mensah’s practice.

According to Mensah, the ambition was never simply to take things from the salon and put them into Ladbroke Hall. ‘We wanted to translate something of the feeling of the salon into an exhibition context: the intimacy, the conversation, the photography, the objects and, most importantly, the people,’ she says. ‘To do that, we had to look at my whole life and understand how it had informed my practice.’

Working with friends and Hairlounge customers, senior curator at V&A East Madeleine Haddon, and interior designer Jacqueline Douglas, Mensah filled the space with images and artifacts, creating an immersive space that will also, for the duration it is open, play host to talks and workshops like ‘Beauty, Business & Belonging’ and ‘The Modern-Day Salon: A Cultural Institution.’

Seeing her life presented before her in this way was an illuminating experience for Mensah. ‘It confirmed something I have always felt: none of this happened overnight, and none of it happened alone. My practice has always been social and relational. The work is hair, but around the hair there has always been family, friendship, conversation and collaboration.’

That was especially true when it came to Mensah’s family: ‘What surprised me was how present my children were at so many important points in the story,’ she says. ‘My son’s bedroom became my first salon in the mid-1990s. Then, while we were going through the archive, I found a photograph of my daughter in 2002 hiding inside the counter that was being made for the salon. That same counter is still there on Portobello Road today. The salon itself was designed by my neighbour, the architect Robert Grace. So even when I look at the physical space, I can see relationships embedded within it.’

Importantly, the exhibition also highlights Mensah’s trailblazing role in the history of afro and textured hair, and how that history has changed over the past 40 years. Mensah says he has seen the visibility of Afro hair change ‘enormously’ but, ‘visibility is only one part of progress’.

‘The conversation I want us to have much more seriously now is about education. There is an art to hairstyling, of course, but underneath the artistry, there has to be knowledge. You have to understand the fundamentals before you can improvise. You crawl, then you walk, then eventually you can run.

‘That is why I believe we need clearer standards and qualifications that properly demonstrate a stylist’s skill set, and that should apply across hairdressing. It is also why education has become such an important part of my own practice.’ To that end, Mensah runs Curl Workshops for families and delivers professional masterclasses for salons because, as she says, ‘ultimately, my idea of inclusion is very simple: somebody with Afro, curly or textured hair should be able to walk into a salon anywhere in this country and know that their hair can be cared for properly.’

'Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters' is on view at Ladbroke Hall until 13 September 2026

Set within a wooded plot beside Wimbledon Common stands 22 Parkside, a landmark of British modernism, recognisable for its glass-and-steel exterior. The home, also known as the Rogers House or Wimbledon House, is a pioneering home designed by Richard Rogers. Built between 1968 and 1970 for his parents, Nino and Dada Rogers, and inspired in part by his upbringing in Italy, the house is considered one of his most personal and influential works.

Enter 22 Parkside, aka the Rogers House, in Wimbledon Common

An example of Hi-Tech architecture and functionalist design, 22 Parkside was built using a prefabricated construction system, reflecting Rogers’ interest in flexible living. Arranged around a central courtyard, two separate single-storey pavilions are flooded with natural light. The house became a testing ground for ideas that would later find expression in some of Rogers’ most celebrated international projects, including the Lloyd’s Building in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Renzo Piano, who designed the latter with Rogers, said: 'There is no doubt that 22 Parkside was one of the most important buildings that Richard created. It worked as a miniature prototype for the sort of approach we took in the Centre Pompidou.'

With the aim of protecting one of the UK’s most important examples of modern architecture for future generations, the house has been donated to the National Trust by the Rogers family through the Richard Rogers Charitable Settlement. Ben Rogers, the son of Richard and Su Rogers, said, 'As a family, we wanted to ensure that this remarkable house would be protected, cared for and shared with future generations, rather than remaining a private asset.'

This acquisition joins the National Trust’s growing collection of 20th-century heritage, which includes 2 Willow Road in Hampstead and The Homewood in Surrey. The charity will curate a programme of guided visits, partnerships and digital content, opening the house to students, researchers and visitors.

The house’s new role as an educational resource reflects a belief that was close to Rogers’ heart, as his wife, Ruthie, explains: 'Richard regarded public access to culture – whether architecture, art, theatre, music, or design – as one of the great aspirations in life. It filled him with such joy that the public would have access to this house that was once private, a house that was a prototype for what he thought houses could be for all.'

22 Parkside will open to the public on Saturday 12 September as part of Open House London. A week later, visitors will also have the chance to step inside Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building, which this year marks its 40th anniversary.

The National Trust notes that public access to 22 Parkside will be introduced in stages while it cares for the building and develops its future programme. nationaltrust.org.uk

‘I'm absolutely mad about rules,’ says artist Amelia Cross, sitting at her studiously arranged desk at Sarabande, the foundation set up by designer Lee Alexander McQueen to support a new generation of creatives. Meticulously realised miniature drawn studies of items of clothing or clothing-related details, such as shirt cuffs, reside alongside a pair of feet shaped canvases encased in white lace socks. Cross has been preparing her first UK solo show ‘Rules of Disappearance’ which opens 10 September 2026 at Angelica Jopling’s Incubator – a gallery championing emerging contemporary art voices – and will showcase a new series of her wonderful ‘sewn paintings’.

Prefect, a new work, is laid neatly on the studio floor. It looks like a school uniform that its wearer has literally just stepped out of. Composed of a perfectly pleated skirt that sits just so, the emerald velvet ribbon trim of its jacket exquisitely stitched, while the matching tonally coloured button is, as you lean in, in fact not a real button at all, but a tiny and perfectly painted rendition of one. As buttons go, it’s beguiling. Prefect is a great introduction to Cross; the prefect badge that sits on the jacket’s lapel is also painted and actually reads ‘perfect’. This kind of knowing use of words and trompe-l’œil effects is central to the way Cross wants to invite the viewer to engage and interact with her painstaking, thoughtful work – most pieces, depending on their size, take around five weeks. ‘I like the idea of the double take or second look,’ she says. ‘My work is quite multiangular too, so you do have to move around them.’

Other pieces in the show include a series of 32 small panels featuring a variety of buttons – 31 of which will be painted and one of which will be real; Cross liked spot-the-difference books as a child. One of the largest works, Marketing Graduate, is a painter’s shirt rendered as a biting dig at the idea of what a young artist might have to endure in the ever-volatile and competitive art market; the interior of the collar reads ‘Tailored for Blue Chips’, while its four front pockets are festooned with the typical artistic tools, from oil sticks to scissors. ‘It’s called the Marketing Graduate because that really is what a lot of emerging artists are,’ says Cross in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way. ‘It’s very anti-art.’

Inspired by McQueen learning the craft of tailoring on Saville Row, Cross initially studied bespoke tailoring at London College of Fashion – her degree show featured four looks that riffed on Lucian Freud paintings – before completing a master’s in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2025.

Her initial experiments in oil revolved around paintings of clothing, but with the figure all but removed, leaving perhaps a singular hand amid two beautifully executed shirts. Cross says her creative breakthrough came with the work Neck (Study) in 2024; having observed her own trench coat draped over a chair, she felt inspired to make its collar, followed by painting its buttons and a subtle shadow that you can barely see in a reproduction photograph.

‘I had to almost reject fashion,’ she says. ‘And then get into painting to return to it. My sewing machine and paints had been next to each other for years, but it had never clicked until the RCA.’

Cross tells a wonderfully rudimentary and DIY story of an early art-fashion cross-over; at around 16, inspired by a Miu Miu collection, she drew cats on a school shirt collar. ‘I would use up all the data on my phone to look at runway shows,’ she laughs. But her interest in clothes began with her mother, who she says has always been very well dressed – ‘She always taught us, if you have a good handbag and a good pair of shoes, you can walk into any room, and you'll be fine’ – while her father’s career as a pilot instigated her lifelong curiosity around uniforms.

Comparisons to Domenico Gnoli are obvious – Cross describes the way he painted the twill diagonal line of a tie with a slight shadow as ‘just delicious’. She notes, too, that conceptual artists such as Yoko Ono, Lawrence Weiner and Marcel Duchamp feel pertinent inspirations. ‘Mary Kelly, I think, is really interesting,’ she says. ‘She did a lot with fashion, in almost using clothing as a documentation of a life, and creating an archive. I think, in a way, maybe that's also what I'm trying to do: create a form of an archive.’ Agnes Martin’s rigour and simplicity similarly chime with Cross’ sensibility. ‘You can see it has taken her years to get that perfect stripe, and I think I'm also chasing that perfect button or stripe.’

Painting mostly from life, Cross’ signature greyish beige Belgian linen offers her a certain restraint – ‘It allows the shadows or the form to do the talking.’ Her process begins with a sketch. She will then pattern-cut as if she is making clothing, deciding crucial measurements before cutting the linen, figuring out dimensions for the stretcher bars and which bits of the linen will need to be primed in order to be painted upon. This is followed by the cutting of each individual piece; she will then begin to paint and sew.

Born in London, Cross grew up in Portugal, returning to the UK to study for her GCSEs. She recognises that the shift in school uniform from a very simple polo shirt to the traditional state-school grey skirt with a blazer and tie cemented her fascination with the language and codes of clothing. ‘You’re judged immediately on how exactly you wear your uniform – there’s such an unspoken language around it,’ she recalls of school-era styling nuances. ‘I do like that tension between the idea that a uniform is a way to equalise but somehow also offers a way in to breaking the rules.’ On a first date, she says her initial question is always ‘What was your school uniform and how did you wear it?’

For a recent show at Nino Mier Gallery in New York, Cross completed extensive archival research into uniforms, specifically school dress codes and workplace attire at both the V&A and the Goldsmith’s Textile Collection. On a board in her studio, there are images of men wearing plus fours from the 1920s, including Cambridge undergraduates. Inspiration is also gathered from real life, specifically on her Northern Line commute. ‘I like to look back, but also look at what people are wearing now because that makes for a new language.’ One of her favourites among this latest work is Sardines, featuring four almost identical navy suit-jacketed arms, which was largely informed by journeying bankers and the varying iterations on a classic navy sartorial uniform.

For those who invest in Cross’ work, they may find a secondary element in addition to the painting itself in the form of some kind of correspondence from the artist. Secret messages, confessional ideas and writings circulate her practice – perhaps another way to keep the audience alert, engaged, looking. For her New York show, Cross made a work called The Price of Privacy, consisting of a small pocket detail and a partly concealed confessional letter detailing the artist’s own sins of the past year. After it sold, she sent the full letter to the buyer – as yet with no response. ‘But that’s part of it,’ she grins. ‘In my mind, I thought they could post it online or maybe just keep it for themselves… I like that these added elements aren’t obvious straight away,’ she says. ‘My work allows me to play, but also to mess with people a little bit.’

Amelia Cross, ‘Rules For Disappearance’, 10 September – 4 October 2026 at Incubator, London, incubatorart.com

In March, British furniture brand SCP announced plans to relocate from the Shoreditch showroom it had occupied for four decades – an unexpected, though perhaps inevitable, development. The previous month, Wallpaper* met founder Sheridan Coakley to hear about the impending move to a townhouse showroom in Clerkenwell – a significant shift not only for the company but for London’s design scene.

When SCP opened in a former upholstery warehouse in Shoreditch in 1985, Coakley chose the location because it was affordable and close to the manufacturers he worked with. As a retail destination, however, it was an industrial backwater. He recalls customers arriving by taxi and asking the driver to keep the meter running. Over the following four decades, the neighbourhood and its design community grew around SCP. New designers were discovered, countless pieces of furniture launched and many a party held.

Coakley himself has remained a pivotal yet famously self-effacing figure in the industry. He began his career as an antiques dealer in Notting Hill before making his name as the man who brought Philippe Starck’s furniture to the UK. He subsequently helped launch the careers of designers including Jasper Morrison, Matthew Hilton and Konstantin Grcic. SCP feels as much like a family as a business, but its ethos is also underpinned by a longstanding commitment to British manufacturing. Its vertically integrated model includes a Norfolk upholstery factory, opened in 2003, which now specialises in sustainable materials and production methods.

Coakley has never shied away from bold decisions, and the Shoreditch building – which combined the company’s offices, showroom and shop – was, he says, 'from a retail point of view', simply no longer working out.

'It’s changed,' he says of bricks-and-mortar retail. 'From a trade point of view, Clerkenwell is a much better place to be located.'

Here on Clerkenwell Green – among the area's many other furniture showrooms – the five-storey townhouse will benefit from the existing trade footfall while continuing to welcome those who want to browse and buy in person, something that Coakley notes is otherwise lacking in the area.

'Our retail and contract businesses are much more aligned now than they used to be,' he explains. Offices and hospitality interiors increasingly have a softer, more residential character, and SCP’s new showroom has deliberately been designed to feel more like a home than a conventional contract space – an approach also embraced by Danish brand Gubi at its nearby Charterhouse Square outpost.

Although its facade resembles a Victorian terrace, Coakley tells us the building was actually constructed in the 1980s. It also comes with a useful annexe, which SCP are using as an events and office space. The interior design is by Simone McEwan and Sacha Leong of Nice Projects – the studio behind 40 Duke, Selfridges' private shopping destination, which opened earlier this year.

At the shop's smart tobacco-brown entrance, a large window draws passers-by inside, where they will find accessories and gifts displayed in a space finished with finger-block parquet flooring. The basement hosts a lighting department designed by long-time SCP collaborator Jon Harrison while the other three floors are dedicated to furniture, arranged in distinct room sets divided by shelving and curtains. The top floor, known as the Apartment, is staged as a private residence rather than a conventional showroom.

The result is decidedly more polished than the previous store, with carefully considered materials and finishes, warm colours, soft lighting and an intentionally residential feel. 'I hope it's not too fashionable,' Coakley laughs. 'We haven't gone for a completely minimalist look.'

The annexe, which was formerly a metalworking workshop, sits in a courtyard at the rear of the building. Its ground floor serves as a meeting space with a materials and samples library, while a kitchen by Very Simple Kitchen – an Italian brand which SCP is launching in the UK during London Design Festival 2026 – is separated by a glass wall. SCP's offices are located upstairs on the first and second floors.

For this month's opening, which happily coincides with London Design Festival, the store is hosting a showcase of vases designed by Martino Gamper for Italian manufacturer Bitossi Ceramiche, alongside furniture by Swedish brand Källemo and lighting by Blue Green Works. Outdoor furniture by London-based woven-textile brand Shore Studios will be displayed in the courtyard.

Ever the pragmatist, Coakley is cautiously optimistic about the move. 'I feel less emotional about it than I did to begin with,' he admits. 'I was very resistant in my head initially because I thought [the move] would be looked upon as a negative thing. But actually, as a project, I'm very excited about it – this is the part I like.'

SCP, 16 Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0QT